I highly suspect he’s full of shit, too. Most likely, he counts all kinds of non-work activities as work, because he does them in an executive-ly capacity. And, in general, claiming you’re a hyper-optimised work machine is fashionable in Silicon Valley.
You mean a lunch-business-meeting, a shit-business-meeting, a mastur… ok, I think I get the idea.
What’s infuriating is that having no work-life balance is promoted as a positive. Sure there are people who are really devoted to their work and thrive on it, but that should be seen as voluntary and not expected. Working long hours also doesn’t necessarily mean you are working efficiently or using your full potential the entire time.
It’s meant to deify these CEOs. Gullible schmoes see this and think “well that makes sense, he spends every hour of his day working. That’s three times more than me! No wonder he makes a million times my salary! See, the only reason I’m not making billions is because I don’t have the divine skills and talent to work on my company all day.” (Or, “I choose to have a work-life balance cause I don’t mind making a little less money”)
These CEOs have PR teams dedicated to slipping out stories like these so it keeps the CEO looking like a king.
Also to convince gullible idiots to put in more hours and make more sacrifices because “that’s what it takes to make it to the top” not realizing that sacrificing your time and energy for a multi-billion dollar corporation won’t make you a billionaire. Rich people love the “hustle and grind” culture because it convinces people that if they just keep producing for the machine, the trickle down will finally come
Ugh. People wasting company time by thinking about their health and welfare and if they can afford their bills. When they should be thinking about the company. Won’t someone think of the profits. Theft. Theft all of it! Makes me so sick I have to take a mental health day away from checking my investments. /s /s /ssssssssss
One of the perks of my job is that we have 50 hours a year in addition to our holidays that we can cash in whenever we need them.
Everyone takes them, but my boss uses a handful each year, stays late every night, only uses half his holidays and loses the rest. I’ll never understand it.
It’s short-sighted not to realize that treating people with dignity will improve their motivation and productivity. My work also has a generous policy for time off, but my colleagues are still considerate when they use it by making sure the important things are done before they leave and that the rest of us will be able to handle things in their absence. There will always be a handful of people who abuse the privilege, but they need to be dealt with individually.
From my observation, the types to work late and have no time off either take an immense satisfaction in working or are avoiding something to come home to.
50 hours??
That ain’t even 10 days …
I currently have at least 20 days, sometimes even 32 depending on the job.
It’s in addition
In addition to my 35 days holiday
Also, having no work-life balance is different if you own a significant fraction of the company vs. if you’re on salary.
Like, if Jensen Huang spends 12 hours over the weekend working on something for nVidia and increases the share price by 0.01% (with a $4.165 trillion market cap, this means it goes up $416 million), his personal net worth will go up by $14.7m. Not bad for a little weekend work.
Let’s assume that someone who is on salary is on something absurd like $1m per year and gets a 500% bonus for working overtime. Their 12 hours of weekend work is going to net them $28k. That’s certainly nice, but it’s about 1/500th of what Huang gets. And, your average engineer probably doesn’t get overtime at all, and if they did it would be closer to $3k not $30k.
If someone who owns a business wants to have a bad work-life balance, that’s one thing. But, it should never be expected of anybody who’s just on salary.
Yes I understand that for some people out there, being a tech executive is their highest passion and true calling. But I hate it when those people turn around and expect everybody to act that way, and act like they’re just more virtuous for doing so. I have a very successful tech career but it’s a job, not my whole life. This society values money, so we keep asking rich people for life advice, as if they have tapped into something deeply human and universal. They haven’t.
And if its voluntary I would more likely categorize it as a hobby rather than work. I think we need a better definition for “work”. Work, to me, is an obligation. People work in order to feed and house themselves. So let’s says someone has $10mil. That is more than enough to easily live off the interest. I would say anyone at that level of wealth never actually works because they have the option to stop at any time, which in my mind makes it a hobby.
I think the Nvidia should get a life.i also agree 100%, if you are working every second of your waking hours then you are far from being efficient.
You don’t see it about single fathers either. Why harp on a gender factor that isn’t relevant when the real issue is class and wealth disparity?
You’re getting hung up on the gender of a hypothetical person brought up as an example in this one instance, where I can’t see why any result would be cause for consternation when, as you say, the focus here should be on the class factor.
I assume the example here was a poor woman in order to maximize juxtaposition of the example versus the subject matter of the cited article, which is about a rich dude. Whatever the reason, this seems irrelevant.
Absolute facts, men are often ignored in this situation, were expected to be strong and handle everything by ourselves like we aren’t humans, someone’s child tryna figure what to do in life. The real enemy of the world is the class war and if we could realise that wed realise we are the 99%
You’re the only person harping on gender.
Here’s something for your toolbox: our society commits idolatry constantly.
he cant even sit through a movie without thinking about his $4.2 trillion tech giant
I’m so close to starting to feel sad for him
Dudes counting thinking about work as work… Which means so many 40 hour jobs should be paid for 80 hour weeks then.
I need a Jira epic for “thinking about work” on my activity timeline.
My uncle was told a long time ago if they went to lunch and talked about work at all to mark the hour as paid and he said he felt bad so didn’t. There is no way I’d not mark that these days.
I’ve billed a client for thinking about their problem while commuting on a train. I don’t see much difference.
It is a lie that CEO’s publicize about themselves. He has two children. If he actually was working 7 days a week from the moment he woke up he would have never had a chance to get married and have children- which is the life his workers lead.
Musk used to brag about working 7 days a week one day, and the next day brag about how he never missed his children’s soccer games.
They don’t understand the actual concept of working. They think taking a call once in a while while out at a soiree counts entirely as work time.
“I had to sit through a 3 hour lunch at Nobu and a visit to a whorehouse with that dreadful bore Altman. What an exhausting 16 hour day.”
Imagine workers would have that attitude…
Musk brags about working 100-hour weeks … while being the CEO of five companies. That means that at best being a CEO of one company is a 20-hour-a-week part time job.
Most are sociopaths who definitely do not think about other people, so it’s probably true that he does nothing else but think about the work. Eg Elon
That’s because his work is thinking about how much money he could be making, not actually producing anything substantial. Those days are long gone
Thinking about work is not the same as working. Maybe he should invest some money into therapy for his work anxiety.
Maybe I can start building up savings if I work overtime by zoning out of movies and thinking about stocking the grocery store for half an hour…
Hell wait, if I just think about being Nvidia CEO, can I split Jensen’s salary?
Thinking about work is not the same as working
I mean that depends entirely on what your work is and what you mean by “thinking”. As a designer/developer, just letting thoughts come and go without forcing it during off times is absolutely productive work that gives me a head start the next time I’m back at work “properly” again.
And as a CEO/business owner your job is making decisions for the most part, and thinking about those decisions should better be a big part of that
Bud claims he’s “working” during his full waking hours. Nah, having a job where your decision making and planning is spread out throughout the day does not mean you’re working all the time.
No NVIDIA employee is going to buy that he’s continuously working while going to the movies, playing golf, hanging out with work buddies over lunch, etc. while they’re physically sitting at a desk working. Sure, there are pockets of work in there and productive things may happen, but he’s not working in the same sense his staff is.
Oh yeah, agreed. I was just irked by the wording a bit
Wat a sad life.
A mother who works two jobs and can’t sit through a movie without thinking about her kids is also sad, but at least she does it for something good
I didn’t realise thinking about work was work.
It’s a sure sign that you have a shitty work life balance.
I was at some work dinner and talked to some guy i didn’t really know. He had a 2 year old child and said something like: “he knows that he and his wife work too much and they hardly see their child.” I gave him a look like: “that’s kinda sad.” But i think he misinterpreted it and said: “oh don’t worry, i’m not a guy who believes in WoRk LiFe BaLaNcE.” Like he was so close to say, i’m not woke or a fag, don’t worry.
Sounds like the kind of shit one might say in a place where you need the money to feed that child and jobs are fire-at-will. What a fucking nightmare!
As a mechanical engineer I can’t really turn it off. It’s why I work yearly jobs and not hourly jobs. But it’s a cool job where I make things, not human drama.
More like a shitty definition of what counts as work.
As a researcher, a good chunk of my work is literally just sitting on my ass and thinking. Or thinking while taking a walk in the park, or thinking while mindlessly chopping wood in a video game. Now with a kid, it’s kind of switched to thinking about what to do for dinner, how I can get the chores done for the day or how to organize my time so that I can fit in a few hours of work. It’s work in the sense that it’s something that needs to be done and it has an energy cost to doing. It’s also not really something you can turn off even if you wanted to.
Yes
That sounds absolutely fucking miserable.
Only difference between this and a drug addict is the drug addict doesn’t generate value
Hey that copper pipe isn’t going to pawn itself
I question how much value this guy actually generates, too. Probably a normal amount for however many hours of work, but he and his immediate colleagues set the wages.
To argue the value of the man is one thing, no CEO is worth a billion times more than their employee. However, my point is moreso that the destructive nature of an addicted individual is only tolerated depending on whether that person has a certain value tied to them.
We would allow men like this to consume the world in favor of helping the drug addict.
I dunno, we shouldn’t view people in terms of generating value, but rather in terms of needs.
What the drug addict needs, is treatment. And this CEO needs a ton of it - to step down and foster a healthier work culture, where workplace democracy is present.
Won’t someone please think of the poor billionaires. :(
The most upsetting part of this is how little time he spends fearing for his fucking life while his buddies’ news stations print articles like this.
Lol nvidia CEO couldn’t do my job for an hour.
I am absolutely confident that I could do his job for an hour.
The empty chair in his office does his job just as easily, too.
You can tell me all about the meetings and deals they have to worry about but ultimately, by the time a company gets that large, it could run itself without a c-suite for quite some time.
Very large companies run themselves by inertia alone… until the c-suite fucks it up trying to make more money.
This must be the 10th time I comment this on Lemmy and you might already know this, but:
The reason a CEO gets paid what he gets paid is not because of the value he adds to the company (as you pointed out, anyone could do the job), but because when the company fucks up (whether due to his decisions, or those of the board, or just anything, really), he takes the fall so the company can keep on doing whatever shady shit they’re doing and the board can act like they had no idea what was going on.
The reason a CEO gets paid what they get paid is that they also sit on the boards of other companies and vote for the compensation packages of their CEOs, who also sit on the board of the CEO’s company. It’s literally a circlejerk.
That helps, but largely the boards consist of major shareholders, or people that the shareholders have elected to be there.
The board, representing the shareholders, needs to make sure the company maximizes shareholder value above all else. They steer the company in very broad strokes. But if the company does something illegal or highly unpopular, the board members want themselves, the shareholders and the company in general to be as insulated as possible. So the CEO is a sacrificial lamb who either resigns or is fired, and takes the golden parachute. The idea is that the CEO was at fault and everything’s gonna be better now (no it’s not lol)
And what kind of job do you think those shareholders do?
They are CEOs of other companies.
Being a CEO and being a shareholder have nothing to do with each other.
The truly rich, AKA the major shareholders, aren’t going to bother with a job, unless running their own company (probably the one they’re the major shareholder at).
Then the big institutional shareholders (Blackrock and the like) invest other people’s money - people like you and me.
Only a minority of shareholders for any given company, are CEOs at other companies.
It’s still a club for the ultra rich and we ain’t in it. I’m just saying that your average CEO is set up to be a scapegoat for even richer and shadier people (while still very much not being one of us working class citizens)
I don’t think I’ve seen enough CEOs take responsibility.
I know one CEO who took full responsibility … in the back.
It’s not that they take responsibility, but rather in extreme circumstances they take the plunge and resign, or they’re fired. So the company can say they’re turning a new leaf
Examples from a quick search:
Hank McKinnell, CEO of Pfizer, received a US$188 million severance package after his resignation, even after a 44% decline in the company’s stock value since he took over in 2001.
Jeff Smisek, the former CEO of United Airlines, received a separation payment of $4.875 million in cash along with additional equity awards and other benefits for a total of close to $37 million.
United was in the middle of a corruption scandal and of course he took the fall, but I’m 100% sure he wasn’t acting alone.
Shady companies are always gonna be shady. But they’ll oust a CEO every now and then to pretend like they’re gonna change.
Does it need that much pay for someone to take the fall?
I feel like, of that’s the primary or sole motivator to pay so much, you could get someone “to take the fall in such rare cases” for much less.
I’d certainly be willing to for 2 mil. I don’t need millions for years and then a multi-million severance package.
Thing is, you may have to go to jail, depending on what the company is caught doing. Your name will be all over the news too.
Nvidia CEO couldn’t do my job for an hour, and I work in tech
I never even had a manager who could do my job, let alone a CEO.
Hour to hour and day to day that’s probably true. But, nVidia is actually an example of a company where their leadership made some smart decisions decades ago by understanding their market extremely well and correctly predicting what was going to be happening in the industry 5-10 years down the line. For example, he went all in on CUDA almost a decade before the AI went mainstream, and because of that decision, nVidia is the biggest company in the world today.
I would bet that if a major decision came up and you had to decide whether or not to go all in on X, you couldn’t actually do his job.
Pathetic! Is this nvidio guy an amateur? i think about work while i SLEEP. i’m easily putting in 140+ hours PER WEEK. is this guy browsing tictac while on the shitter or what? get your numbers up lil bro, someday you’ll make it big. i swear nobody wants to work anymore, bunch of entitled slackers
/s
I know your joking but I have had nightmares about work. I hate it.
Was there even an article to go with this headline, or do we just publish any off–hand remarks made by rich tech dudes now?
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