
Most offices work on shifts, allowing their employees a healthy 8-9 hours of work followed by time and space for personal life. Amidst the concerns of work stress and exceeding hours of duty, people often talk about struggling to maintain work-life balance. With respect to this, there’s an X post that is going viral and drawing the attention of netizens.
An Indian-American CEO named Daksh Gupta recently posted about long hours of work and poor work-life balance. Wait, he didn’t express concerns, rather he defended the work pattern. He supported the idea of making employees work for a longer period, as long as 14 hours a day.
Read X post below
recently i started telling candidates right in the first interview that greptile offers no work-life-balance, typical workdays start at 9am and end at 11pm, often later, and we work saturdays, sometimes also sundays. i emphasize the environment is high stress, and there is no…
— Daksh Gupta (@dakshgup) November 9, 2024
He expressed being convinced about the 14-hour-long work-life as a CEO, but also pointed out the need to communicate the same to employees. He felt transparency was important and the subordinates must be informed about their stressful work environment beforehand.
“No work-life balance, stressful environment”
“I started telling candidates right in the first interview that greptile offers no work-life-balance, typical workdays start at 9am and end at 11pm, often later, and we work saturdays, sometimes also sundays,” Gupta wrote. “I emphasize the environment is high stress, and there is no tolerance for poor work”, he added. Read again, he said “emphasize” and not “empathise”.
Further, he spoke about clearly informing employees about their work environment and said, “It felt wrong to do this at first but i’m convinced now that the transparency is good, and i’d much rather people know this from the get go rather than find out on their first day”.
Netizens react to viral post
This post has gone viral and gathered many reactions.
“Transparency is great but I’m curious what makes you think this is going to make your company win vs. doing the bare minimum of giving weekends off to increase productivity that can lead to better work in lesser hours?”, one user asked Gupta, disagreeing to his remark on 14 hours of work a day.
Good question – < 10% of seed stage startups become so big so the equity is worth anything, so if you wanted to become wealthy through equity, you’d want to work at the highest potential 10%, which would be roughly the hardest working 10%
There are brilliant people that get…
— Daksh Gupta (@dakshgup) November 9, 2024
He wants to get rich quick with inadequately compensated sweatshop labor.
Chickens will soon come home to roost
— N (@NS18091995) November 10, 2024
Nothing wrong in someone needing x people to realize his dream project but hiring x/2 and calling it a “hard working environment”? That’s exploitation pure and simple. Good luck with the endless crunch, that’s not someone I’d trust with any project management.
— Lias Kwerk Looi (@LiasKwerkLooi) November 10, 2024
You know, there are people who actually enjoy working this way -for many reasons. Usually they are known as driven.
— maria vougioukalaki (@MeMariaVc) November 10, 2024
“It’s great to see that you’re already exploiting workers straight out of college, take advantage as much as you can, people are just meat computers to be used for your own personal gain”, second user said.
While not many agreed to the CEO’s statements of expecting workers to put in efforts “starting at 9am and end at 11pm, often later”, but those who did were only convinced about the transparency.
“Full marks for transparency. Zero marks on work culture, you can’t expect people to work 9-11 or later every single day? They won’t be productive, they’ll crash and burn and take your business down too”, one wrote. “Transparency is a must, but this work environment sounds horrendous”, another noted.
Meanwhile, one of the netizens summed up to say, “The problem is not with telling people this, honesty is good the problem is with running your company this way”. “That’s exploitation pure and simple”, another added.
