Late-night emails from the bosses: Are we awake and smiling? Is it quiet? Does the Musk-Bondi memo on “Hard Core” work culture have a problem?
Have you received an email at midnight from the boss that was frighteningly titled “a fork in the road”? Email etiquette doesn’t say we should get midnight emails from bosses. It is reasonable to assume that Musk did not get the memo on compassionate leadership. After laying off half of the staff, he promised to take a nap at the office until the org was fixed, and later gave the remaining employees a late-night ultimatum. Were they ready to be hard core? They can choose if they want to get three months of severance pay.
“Hard core” may be a term more often associated with graphic pornography, mosh pits or, when used as a noun, people resistant to change, but it’s a linguistic favorite of Mr. Musk’s. He’s used it to refer to his SpaceX efforts and employees’ need to work harder to control costs at Tesla (another company he famously slept on the floor of) and as part of a recruitment effort for corporate litigators — er, “hardcore street fighters.” But most of these, of course, were in the hard-core days of our pre-Covid lives, back when “girlboss” was still a compliment and the idea that “nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week” — another Muskism — was (mostly) applauded.
American work culture is having a problem. Are we arise andgrind people or are we quiet? Are we similar to the Musk and Bankman-Fried model of going so hardcore that we would be willing to sleep at the office? Or are we evolving, recognizing the toxicity of hustle culture and finally setting boundaries?
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The renovation, first reported by Forbes, has since caught the eye of San Francisco’s Department of Building Inspection for possible code violations. An anonymous complaint about the setup went into the inspectors via the city’s handle.
The communications director said that they investigate all complaints. He said that if suites 900 and 950 are no longer in keeping with the building code, a notice of violation will be issued.
Musk responded in a characteristically dismissive way, tagging the city’s mayor in a tweet accompanied by a local news report on fentanyl: “So city of SF attacks companies providing beds for tired employees instead of making sure kids are safe from fentanyl. Where are your priorities @LondonBreed !?)
Sleeping in the office is about as extreme as it sounds, though it is not much of a stretch from the Silicon Valley logic that has been copied by countless other businesses.
The idea is to pack the office with perks and the comforts of home. When you arrive to work in jeans and a company sweatshirt you will stop by the cafeteria for breakfast and coffee and then head to coding for 12 hours and break for a company-hosted happy hour.
Take it from Musk himself, who in 2018 tweeted that “nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week.” Bankman-Fried is the founder of now-bankrupt FTX.
“If I sleep in the office, my mind stays in work mode and I don’t have to reload everything the next day,” Bankman-Fried tweeted in February 2021, more than a year and a half before his multi-billion-dollar crypto empire went down in flames.
Dan Lyons is the author of the book “Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us.”
Lyons told the Wharton Business School that there was no productivity gained if you worked beyond 60 hours a week. If you do sprints over and over again, it stops working. People need rest time.”
Quiet quitting, the Great Resignation, work-life balance, or “lying flat,” as many in East Asia call them, have become the new buzzy monikers for the trend.
It is difficult to nail down a movement that spans striking nurses, unionizing strippers, and work-from- home bankers, wrote Helaine Olen in a column. Americans have made significant strides toward restoring it’s proper role in our lives after decade of subservience to work.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/07/business/nightcap-twitter-work-culture/index.html
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