Ask HN: Just saw a YC25 job posting front page that looks like a 7-day work week

This is on the front page right now: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/salespatriot/jobs/M46X6YX-forward-deployed-engineer

Some notable things:

a. Go. Fly out and plant yourself inside the customer's operation. Weekdays are onsite (Wisconsin, New York, Miami, Los Angeles); weekends we regroup at the SF HQ to debrief and keep building.

Sounds like a 7 day work week to me.

b. Absolute grinder. Interested in co-living (though not required). Comfortable with ambiguity and rapid change.

You're expected to work 7 days a week and completely blur the line between personal and professional life by "co-living"? What kind of person wrote this?

59 points | by walrus01 4 hours ago

17 comments

  • altairprime 4 hours ago
    Yes, they explicitly brag about this in their LinkedIn feed:

    (1 month ago) https://www.linkedin.com/posts/salespatriot_forward-deployed...

    > Forward Deployed Engineers in the wild. We said "go relax." They brought their laptops onto a duck float. Because when you're helping customers manage supplier communications semi-autonomously and speed up America's defense industrial base, "break" is a relative term. This is the energy.

    (I don’t make a habit of checking that site but happy to make an exception to answer this post’s ‘did I interpret correctly?’.)

  • vgeek 2 hours ago
    I clicked through each of the founder's LinkedIn profiles for that posting because something seemed... off about it. One was listed as a Forbes 30 under 30, combined with the language/curation of their pages, made me think these are going to join the likes of Holmes/SBF/Charlie Javice.
  • kaikai 4 hours ago
    I got a recruiting email recently for a job that had 5 days onsite, but SATURDAY was work from home, listed like it was a perk.

    It’s wild out there.

  • vetrom 3 hours ago
    The being expected to fly around the country weekly in conjunction with 'this is not a remote position' is pretty wild.
    • walrus01 1 hour ago
      If a person is expected to spend 1.5 to 2.0 days out of a 7 day week in SF and the rest of the time travelling to some random location in the 48 states, you might as well make your legal residence a state with no state income tax (since obviously you don't spend >51% of your year in SF).
  • JSR_FDED 47 minutes ago
    I wouldn’t touch this with a 10ft pole. But I know this wasn’t ever intended for me - they’re looking for young single people who’ll buy in to the cult aspect of it.

    However, there’s a scenario worth considering. If you believe that early career people are most at risk of being replaced by AI, then doing a job like this for even a single year is a very compressed way to get several years of experience in a short time. Multiple different customer situations (different industries, tech stacks, cultures), and living in the cult HQ also means you absorb a lot of the experiences of your colleagues through osmosis.

    After this when you’re looking to go work for a real company, you’re in a much stronger position in a tight employment market when you can point to 10 actual projects you’ve done with lots of variety.

  • beiarea 1 hour ago
  • newsomix9xl 3 hours ago
    You get to work from home two days a week: Saturday and Sunday.
    • walrus01 3 hours ago
      But also a good portion of every Sunday is going to be flying coach all the way across the continent to NYC or Miami, because you're expected to be on-site at the customer premises at 8am every Monday! You'd better be sure to get some work done on that flight or the company leadership will notice.
  • walrus01 4 hours ago
    Adding URL here in a comment to make it clickable

    https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/salespatriot/jobs/M46X...

  • ungreased0675 1 hour ago
    Sounds insane. A delusional lunatic would expect that from an employee, and only a crazy or extremely desperate person would take that job.

    What’s the equity and salary for completely dedicating your entire life to this company? Why not just hire two or three normal 40-hour employees?

    • ButlerianJihad 1 hour ago
      > completely dedicating your entire life to this company

      Catholics like me would refer to that arrangement as “a religious vocation”. So it would come with room & board, wraparound health care, community living, celibacy, hard labor and/or lofty intellectual pursuits.

      It’s interesting how the secular world continually tries to recapitulate these phenomena.

      • squigz 42 minutes ago
        Ahh, you almost had me up until the celibacy!
  • hackable_sand 3 hours ago
    Saw this too.

    Their name is Sales Patriot, hiring a "FDE", and they are funded by YC.

    That should be enough information by itself.

  • toomuchtodo 3 hours ago
    Is this legal under California labor law?
    • toast0 2 hours ago
      Probably? I imagine most of these jobs are 'exempt' and so paying for overtime isn't required. Otherwise, obscene hours are legal as long as the employer is paying overtime (including paying hours for missed rest periods)

      Anyway, most of the work is going to be done out of state...

  • ofjcihen 3 hours ago
    The founders look like they can’t be out of their early-mid 20’s… this stinks of a frat-house 3 AM convo that made it to the next morning.
  • horticulturist 4 hours ago
    Seems more like a cult than a job. Hopefully the equity is like… a lot.
  • edot 4 hours ago
    I mean, for 0.15-0.20% and a top end salary of $200k living in SF that sounds like a great opportunity!
    • vunderba 27 minutes ago
      Kills me when people don't internally adjust a stated annual salary against a workweek that is almost assuredly brutally higher than a standard 9-5. Between the "grinder mindset," the on-site traveling, etc. you're probably easily pushing 60 hours a week.

      A standard 200k full-time job clocks in at around $96 / hour. This job is more like $64 / hour.

    • kaikai 4 hours ago
      Don’t get me wrong, $200k is a lot of money, but it’s not a top end tech salary in SF.
      • steve_adams_86 3 hours ago
        It’s quite poor given that you don’t get to have a life outside of work, too. I’d start to think that sounds great if it was a 4 day work week, but 7… Bizarre.
    • walrus01 4 hours ago
      200k in SF with CA income taxes and SF cost of living is not that much at all. It's low enough that "No, you can't ever hope to afford to buy a home or get a mortgage in the city of your legal residence" is a flat out fact.
      • duskwuff 3 hours ago
        Good news / bad news: employees are also expected to "co-live in our Warsaw & SF Hacker Houses" (i.e. corporate frat house).

        Not quite sure how they get "teams of 20" living in those houses with a total company size of 15, though.

        • walrus01 3 hours ago
          Maybe they have some ex US Navy submariners that have introduced the concept of hot bunking.
    • sheepscreek 1 hour ago
      Yeah, it's not much for SF.
    • gedy 4 hours ago
      Are you serious? That's not much to be able to live there. And for the top end no less?
  • caseymarlin 3 hours ago
    [flagged]
  • andsoitis 4 hours ago
    Yes and? If this is not appealing to you, don't apply. But for some the travel and being at different customer sites is energizing and fun.
    • walrus01 4 hours ago
      I don't know if I'd really define "some" travel as flying SF to NYC (or SF to Miami, or Wisconsin) every sunday afternoon/evening, and then flying NYC to SF every Friday evening. That meets a definition more like "constant" to me rather than "some".
      • duskwuff 3 hours ago
        Don't forget that you're flying NYC to SF to "regroup at the SF HQ to debrief and keep building". What, you thought you got the weekend off? Rise and grind.
    • browningstreet 3 hours ago
      It shouldn’t even be legal.
      • eqvinox 3 hours ago
        It isn't, in a bunch of other countries.
      • amazingamazing 2 hours ago
        Why not? Should it be illegal for someone to have multiple part time jobs?
  • android521 2 hours ago
    let me guess, the founders must be chinese origin.
    • walrus01 1 hour ago
      You could have taken 20 seconds to do some casual research like googling name of company + founders, but nope, you just jumped to some casual racism. Good job. For the record, they're not.
    • tlhunter 1 hour ago
      Nope