Dark sides of working at a tech startup | by Jainil Vachhani | Medium

It’s 8:10 a.m. Shoot. You are late for work. You rush to the shower, while mentally calculating the number of hours of sleep you had last night.

You reach your office at 9:05 a.m. to just miss your coffee. You calculate the hours till lunch. You ignore recruiters’ emails and start working on the task at hand.

Your colleague is on leave. The office looks kinda empty. The colleague makes 20% of your workforce.

It’s 12:30. Your boss books Uber to visit a posh restaurant. The whole ‘work hard party harder’ attitude was fun for a couple of months. Now, you would rather trade travel time for a nap. You upload pictures of your burger on Instagram, the only upside for the day. You sip your drink and think about the task at hand.

You return to the office, to discover, that you lost a client. Salary will be delayed, although nobody talks about it. You mentally calculate how long will your savings last (not very long).

You receive a text from your friend. He wants to go to movies tomorrow. It’s a public holiday. But, not for you. You don’t even bother asking your boss. You mentally calculate the number of days till the weekend. Your mental math skills have sharpened lately.

At 4:00 p.m. you receive a call from a client. Requirements have changed. Frustrated, you start working on refactoring your code.

At 6:30 p.m. you have snacks. You decide to fill up on bites and skip the dinner.

At 9:30 p.m. you have a stand-up meeting. Your CEO queries regarding everybody’s tasks for the day. Everyone else has finished, you haven’t. However, that would mean everybody else would be required to wait for you to complete tomorrow before integrating the codebase. You are in everyone’s bad looks already. You lie. You decide to go home and work for a couple of hours. You don’t realize half of your team was lying as well.

It’s 12:30 a.m. You have finally finished your task. You did not have time to unit test. You commit your undocumented code and hope that it won’t break.

You and are browsing through Instagram. You see your friend’s selfie at the gym. He seems to have a proper work-life balance. He hangs out with friends and has time to exercise while your ever-increasing waistline forces you to loosen your belt another notch. You decide to ask him for a referral. You remember the email you received earlier today and send the recruiter your resume. Then, you mentally calculate the number of hours you have to sleep.