“He explained that he had consciously set aside certain aspects of his family life, since he believes that startups fail when those involved aren’t committed to being available 24 hours a day.
Sleep no more jobs software#
A Wired journalist quotes Steve Davis, the CEO of a software company serving financial institutions, and a professed Jobs acolyte, living the dream. So intense is the work expectation that the biography of late Apple CEO Steve Jobs has become a sort of Bible for the aspiringly sleep-deprived. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg has even confessed to “sneaking” out of the office to have dinner with her family so as not to run afoul of overwrought office cultures. Silicon Valley’s countercultural vibe has long masked its Wall Street-style labor discipline: a heavy emphasis on smartness, flexibility, and willingness to work more grueling hours than the guy next to you. Nowhere is this more prominent than in the tech world, land of startups, where one is supposed to identify with the company absolutely. The ideal worker is the worker whose whole meaningful life happens within the four walls of the office, or whose wage work has expanded to fill the home.
Employees, to get ahead, not only work all the hours of the day, but all the hours not in the day, and sleep on the couch with pens slipping from their hands like college students. In an office environment in which success depends on being “strategic” about hygiene, personal time is taken like a Jetson’s meal pill: compressed, trivial, quickly swallowed. A few months later, Mayer received a further plaudit, albeit a less lucrative one: she topped Business Insider’s list of “19 Successful People Who Barely Sleep.” “She used to put in 130 hour weeks at Google,” explained Insider, and “she managed that schedule by sleeping under her desk and being ‘strategic’ about her showers.” A pregnant woman who had occupied the top tier of Google, but still a rare bird. The board knew they needed a sort of miracle, something so extraordinary that it’d jolt the company into success, so they took a deep breath, prayed and threw a Hail Mary pass: they hired a pregnant woman.
Marissa Mayer was recently made CEO of Yahoo, the struggling online media giant.
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