A few stories at Protocol's Workplace newsletter. First up, November 12:
“Sleeping on the floor of the office” is the new “rest and vest.”
If a return to hustle culture is bubbling up from this week’s bloodbath of layoffs, Esther Crawford may be that movement’s poster child. A photo of Crawford — a director of product management at Twitter — sleeping on the floor of the office went viral on Twitter last week as Elon Musk prepared to lay off half the company. Evan Jones, a product manager who reports to Crawford, captioned it “when you need something from your boss at Elon Twitter.”
The photo sparked a debate around just how devoted you should be to your job, with some replies labeling office all-nighters as would-be “labor violations” and fodder for “trauma bonding” while others commended Crawford for her dedication.
Large tech companies have been on a hiring spree for years. Compared with startups, Big Tech has long offered employees a better work-life balance and — thanks to the talent shortage — less aggressive performance management, leading to the “rest and vest” stereotype immortalized in “Silicon Valley”’s portrayal of Big Head drinking Double Gulps on the roof at Hooli. But with seemingly endless growth no longer in the cards, that may be about to change.
The brutal layoffs at Twitter, Meta, and Salesforce, following other large cuts at Stripe and Lyft, could mean Big Tech jobs are about to get a whole lot less cushy. Already, Salesforce has updated its policies to make it easier to fire people, and Musk has told employees that remote work is no longer allowed at Twitter.
Crawford sleeping at the office seemed to exemplify this shift, and among those who expressed support were similarly minded tech leaders. Former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman was one such founder who cheered Crawford on.
“This is how great new things are built, more often than anyone has been willing to say during the last decade’s cultural revolution in Silicon Valley,” Friedman tweeted on Saturday.
Not all founders think this way. Miguel de Icaza, who co-founded developer tool maker Xamarin with Friedman, disagreed with that assessment, tweeting that he had left Xamarin at 5 p.m. each day to prioritize a “healthy work/life balance.”
“I think that asking people to work extra hours just [gives] you low quality output,” he wrote. “And in the context of these layoffs is crass.”
And Crawford herself addressed the furor over the viral tweet.
“Doing hard things requires sacrifice (time, energy, etc.),” Crawford tweeted. “We are less than one week into a massive business and cultural transition. People are giving it their all across all functions: product, design, eng, legal, finance, marketing, etc.”
The tight labor market put more power in the hands of workers, which — at least in Big Tech — has led to a shift away from hustle culture and toward work-life balance and self-care. Nolan Church, the co-founder and CEO of the people-leader talent marketplace Continuum, said hard work had become “demonized” over the last decade.
“It hasn’t been trendy to talk about hard work,” he said. “People call it hustle porn. It has been bad-mouthed for the last five, 10 years.”....
....MUCH MORE
November 11: "Meta, Twitter, and Stripe engineers wanted: Laid-off tech workers have a job opportunity in climate tech"
November 10: "Salesforce adjusted its HR policies to make firing workers easier"
