Honestly, this is a continuation of my previous post. For anyone wondering – my boss is currently wanting me to work 12-16h+ and has also asked me to work on Saturdays. He just sent me a text the other day when I was not aware he wanted me to work on Saturdays asking where I was. When I texted him back and asked him if I was supposed to work then, he replied that its extremely important to him and his company that employees are available any time during the day, after hours, weekends and even holidays. That concept to me is extremely strange, considering he is paying me nothing special. It's a start up and when I joined we discussed the occasional after-hours and maybe the 1 in 5th Saturday a few hours to help out but now it is turning out to be a non-stop 'grind' culture gig. Sure, the prospect of the company growing and me being one of the early hires with the potential of growing my career is great, however it's just too much grinding for a maybe.
The founder seems to think that just because he wakes up 6am and finishes work at 12am everyone else should too. They recently hired a complete baboon of a co-founder who is talking out of his ass most of the time. He claims that he can do 5 of our jobs easily. We all know that it isn't true. He has made some extremely outlandish claims, seemingly to highlight how inefficient the team and the employees are. Just to give a clarification most people work 3-4 hours average PAST their working time and have agreed to help on weekends. It has gotten so bad that people have routinely cried on Zoom. We are a team of 7 people running 2 departments and 1 of the people has already given his resignation and on Saturday an other team-member got fired. It's extremely scary because it's a person who had worked extremely hard and I am not exaggerating when I say that she is literary holding the entire company together alone. The worse thing is that everyone knows its because of her salary. It's 10k more than I get, but she works on DEMAND for them – any hour of the day. The founder/co-founder's idea now is that they can hire 2 people for her price and seem to think that those 2 people will be more productive or will know more than she does. She has been with them for almost 2 years and knows the ins and outs of everything.
It's so upsetting because she called me crying and I can feel that she feels so betrayed by them. It really makes me think that 'Sure. I will work my ass off for them but once they grow or don't need me, they will dispose of me like they did with her'. It definitely is not a culture where they promote within and it just seems toxic overall. Before they fired her they kept making fun of her or kept flustering her during our meetings to 'show' how she wasn't good enough.
I know that at least 5 other people are thinking of leaving who have been there 2+ years. What I've heard is that it has gotten worse and worse over the past few months. Apparently the company is to secure funding soon so they are planning major expansion, however I don't know if I can mentally last until then with all the work that I know they will want me to do.
Anyone ever been in a situation like this and has advice?