Tech founder boasts about his company having no work-life balance, gets trolled online

A healthy work-life balance might be one of the most essential things to prevent burnout at work. So, today, many organizations try to ensure their employees have that. However, one founder openly admitted that his organization has no work-life balance and he expects his employees to give their all to the organization. The founder of Greptile AI, Daksh Gupta–who goes by @dakshgup on X–shared his thoughts recently, but many people disagreed with the ideology.

"Recently, I started telling candidates right in the first interview that Greptile offers no work-life balance, typical workdays start at 9 AM and end at 11 PM, often later," the post began. "We work Saturdays, sometimes also Sundays. I emphasize the environment is high-stress and there is no tolerance for poor work." Gupta added, "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." The founder continued, "Curious if other people do this and if there's some obvious pitfall I'm missing." Many people in the comment section expressed their disagreement with how his organization follows its working rules.

@deedydas wrote, "The transparency is fine, but the pitfall is that if you offer no work-life balance for long enough, employees will churn and affect your progress more. It takes a lot of time to hire and ramp up new engineers, so you have to be careful about how hard you work them. You are a founder; they have <1% equity. It's a fine line (I get that you want them to work hard), but young founders often make this mistake and it can be really bad for the company. Give positive reinforcement for doing good work; don't force people to work. You will also struggle to hire senior talent this way. Measure outputs, not (just) inputs."

@Rahll sarcastically commented, "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 personal gain." @LiasKwerkLooi remarked, "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." @McNolf shared, "If you're not giving them large amounts of equity, why on earth would they do that." @_jaydeepkarale expressed, "Fairplay disclosing this early one. Work culture shouldn't be like this, though. Humans aren't designed for this. Anyone who signs up for this voluntarily is doing it most probably out of some desperation."

In an update, Gupta shared, "To everyone who is overworked and underpaid at their software jobs, especially outside the US, I feel for you and I'm sorry this struck a nerve. The people that work here had 6-figure 20 hr/week jobs before this and can go back to them any time." He went on, "This way of working isn't supposed to be forever because it isn't sustainable. It's the first year or two of a startup, which is like reaching escape velocity. This is NOT meant to be prescriptive. There are brilliant people who run successful companies full of brilliant people who don't push themselves this hard."