Founder of Indian ride-share biz Ola calls for 70-hour work week Indian tech entrepreneur Bhavish Aggarwal – founder of Ola Cabs, Ole Electric and AI unicorn Ola Krutrim – doubled down on support for 70-hour work weeks during an interview posted last Sunday. Aggarwal told [VIDEO] India outlet ANI News that he works 20 hours a day, seven days a week – toil he has also previously boasted …
(Indian AI answers helpfully)
Would you like me to formulate alternatives? I can also auto-correct as you screw that screw and penalize the lazy bastards in the process. I have access to an automated LART and will keep them awake and productive. Would you like me to supersize your products?
Not at all. Just another greedy bastard hypocritically couching his own self-interest in pseudo-moralistic language, trying to normalise the idea that regular peons have some obligation to work themselves to death to make *him* rich.
Because, let's be blunt, that's the difference. Even if he *does* work "20 hours a day, seven days a week"- and I'm calling bullshit on that- he's doing so by choice, and for his own enrichment, via the company *he* owns.
None of that applies to his salaried employees, unless he's planning on upping what they earn by several orders of magnitude and/or giving them equity in the company that'll make them similarly rich. Of course, he won't because he can't, and because people like him didn't get rich by fairly sharing that wealth.
In short, either put up pay up or shut up fuck off.
IFF your job offers purpose and fulfils you, and you really enjoy doing it you can work crazy hours. Look at researchers. One does not work as a researcher, one is a researcher, the interest in the chosen subject drives them onwards.
Those of us with mundane jobs don't. We also don't get a bajillion dollars in "compensation", we get a salary. We also have to take care of mundane tasks like laundry, shopping, and dropping the kids off at sports / music lessons / chess boxing / whatever. We cannot pay people to do all of that for us, unlike this person that I think is an ultra rich and disconnected from reality idiot. We also like spending time with our families.
Also: If you sleep four hours it does not mean you are working 20 hours. You need to eat at some point (and, well, excrete, though this guy apparently does it perfectly through his mouth and through Xitter), get a haircut, see a GP or a dentist and a million other things. This does not normally count as work for us.
He also seems to have a beef with Western culture as well as a lot of post-colonial resentment, but doesn't explain why a whole generation of young people in his own country should now do 'penance' by working ridiculous hours just because he does.
... he works 20 hours a day, seven days a week
Then he's either a liar or a fool.
Working that long and sleeping 4 hours a day is a recipe for poor decisions, confusion and burn-out.
On the other hand he seems to be well balanced, a chip on both shoulders. I agree with simonlb he comes over as someone who cannot let go of the past and what on Earth does doing "penance" mean.
He is one of those people who lives to work and condemns others who work to live and I am glad that I do not have to work for him.
Working that long and sleeping 4 hours a day is a recipe for poor decisions, confusion and burn-out.
Burn-out is fine, if the employee is easily replaceable. The philosophy is productivity mixed with the mythical man month. Have 20hr days, need fewer employees. Have employee paid for a 20hr day but charged out based on 8hr day + overtime and rejoice at the profits. But as you say, the majority of people can't work a 20hr day, mistakes get made by tired workers and any productivity gains are quickly lost dealing with the mistakes. Employees are people, not just resources. Work'em too hard and performance suffers and they break.
If the dude works 20 hours a day, then he is not sleeping for 4 hours.
Let us be generous, and suggest that he manages to wash, eat all the day's meals, commute to and from work and take all his toilet-time compressed into an hour, that leaves him with 3 hours for sleep.
Does he look like a ragged unkept wreck of a man?
No?
Then he is lying or counting a lot of non-work stuff as work.
Narcisistic prick
One other way in which he isn't wrong - there's a new generation that is going to have to pay for the collective selfishness and overconsumption of their parents and grandparents. I wouldn't call it 'penance' though, that's taking the consequences for your own actions. Rather they will have to take the consequences of other people's actions:
1) Massive debt in all western countries, accrued like there's no tomorrow, helped along by the assumption that low interest rates will last forever. That debt will have to be repaid by future generations, whether by taxation or inflation.
2) The continued ignorance around the looming social security disaster. FFS France just torpedoed the only adult in the room who was willing to face the facts that if your population is living 10 years longer, you have to increase retirement age by 6-7 years. But they couldn't stomach even a 3 year increase. But that's just the extreme case, social security will be bankrupt everywhere in a decade or so. Bonus idiot points for those who are against immigrant workers - whose taxes are going to pay your pension when you're retired? And who's going to take care of you and nurse you when you're too infirm to take care of yourself?
I came here to say the same thing. People like him and Musk don't seem to understand why salaried and bossed staff don't share the same passion as he does for his money making hobbies.
Would I do more than a 40ish hour a week job? Hell no. Do I have hobbies and interests that if I could consider my "employment", would I be "working" 70+ hours a week? Easily! (although I'd expect my family and friends to kick me up the arse until I shook out of it)
The other obvious point is that he (supposedly) worked all those hours for a company that *he* founded and owned and is getting rich off.
Your average salaried employee isn't even likely to get paid extra for working that many hours, let alone the equity and/or reward that would make them equally rich. If they were the same type of person as him, they'd likely be doing the same- i.e. starting their own company, not working for someone else.
even here in the us after the commute, work and sleep it get 3 hours to myself which is divided up between shopping, making supper, doing things that need doing such as a laundry. lucky if i have a few minutes to do some reading or something else interesting. didn't count the hour in the morning it takes to get ready for the commute which doesn't include breakfast.
In India housemaids are common, and I'm sure he has several - cleaners, cooks, butlers, chauffeurs, and more.
This guy clearly does zero work outside his job. Ditto all the other billionaire twats that want to enslave their workers.
That's how he can spend more hours on his work - although 20 hours a day is clearly a complete fabrication unless he classifies a lot of what other people call 'wasting time' as work.
Man who relies on other people working to generate his ludicrous income, demands those other people work ludicrous hours in order to earn him even more ludicrous income.
Here's Tom with the weather...
(What an asshat! Since what he's advocating is actually illegal (even in India), what are the chances he's going to be charged with encouraging law breaking? *crickets chirping *... Didn't think so...)
You'd be surprised how many hours you can work if you've got a nice big slab of equity that's maturing. But this is the mistake all bosses -- especially owner/bosses -- make. They've forgotten what it means to work for a wage and just a wage and so don't understand why their minions don't identify with their interests.
> Aggarwal told India outlet ANI News that he works 20 hours a day, seven days a week
Uh huh. Pull the other one, it's got bells on. Does he think "checking my texts every so often" constitutes work? I used to have co-workers like that.
When they pay me for 70 hours a week, I'll work 70 hours a week. Wait, what? you want those extra hours for free? Nope, not happenin', Mr. Techbro.
Right now, I work 10 hours a day... but I get paid 10 hours a day, and I get every Friday off. And honestly, it lets me turn off the phone and get "in the zone" for a while and crack out some code.
"I'll be out of the office due to (possibly-or-possibly-not valid reason), but I'll be checking voicemail and email."
So managers are paid full wages for quasi-working, but when the rank-and-file workers can't make it to the office due to (valid reason), we have to take unpaid leave.
"Paid for 70 hours a week" would, for me, include:
40 hours at regular pay rate
10 hours at 1.5x rate
10 hours at 2x rate
10 hours at 3x rate
In other words, if you want ME to work 70 hours a week, pay me like it's 105 hours, If you want a warm body to do it, hire 2 fulltimers and pay them (together) 80 hours pay for 80 hours worked. You'll still end up better off, for amount paid, time worked, and quality of work.
Even with that ridiculous scale, I'd still leave after a couple weeks.
"And honestly, it lets me turn off the phone and get "in the zone" for a while and crack out some code."
As Vimes said to Littlebottom, "we work to the job, not the clock". I've been like that for every job I cared about. I know when I've run out of steam and it isn't the same every day but chances are that it's at least 40/week.
Some possibilities:
1. He's simply lying about his working 20 hours/day, 7 days/week.
2. He has the ability to work in in his sleep.
3. He's using Bolivian marching powder to stay semi-conscious 20 hours/day, and it's making him mentally unbalanced.
4. His innate God-like genetics allow him to transcend the biological need for sleep.
See: "When I was Your Age" by Wierd Al Yankovic @:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SnAF2o5y63w
Icon for, "When I was your age, we'd ..."
1. He's simply lying about his working 20 hours/day, 7 days/week.
2. He has the ability to work in in his sleep.
3. He's using Bolivian marching powder to stay semi-conscious 20 hours/day, and it's making him mentally unbalanced.
4. His innate God-like genetics allow him to transcend the biological need for sleep.
Probably the superposition of all four.
This box wallah is decidedly doolally (Deolali.)
If he and fellow travellers were to have their way the poor working sods on the subcontinent would probably have been better off under Clive (perhaps not quite, but still...)
The insane, patently unwinnable war on the past serves only to distract the deluded polloi from the ills of the present, their contemporary causes and potential remedies, usually to the enrichment of the warmongers.
So much to pick at but this:
We used to spend ₹100 crore [about $12 million] a year but we've made that 0 this month by moving completely to our in house Ola maps!"
I mean that's total bullshit, because your data centre et al doesn't run for free. Maybe you're doing some tax fiddle to get the cost to appear zero to you and a loss to some other business arm, which sounds like it's probably screwing your countries economy a little into the bargain. What a hero.
doing 20 hours a day, manual labour e.g. in India still lots of small scale non mechanised farms, where you still need to manually till the soil, milk the cattle etc.
He wouldn't last a day, never mind a week.
Tweeting & pontificating is not work, its narcissistic self aggrandisement (and seems to be a lot of his "work" hours)
> It is exactly what happened 200 years ago with the East India Company
Not quite. Back then we came in with guns and forced you to do it. Now like a diabetic in a sweet shop you're doing it to yourself.
It seems like only England learned the lesson from its centuries of oppression that oppression comes back to bite you in the arse. Or chop off your head.
When Deng took over China in 1976 the GDP per capita of China was lower than that of England in the middle ages, people in China had a lower quality of life than medieval peasants. Now China is a rapidly developing country and a regional power.
If you want to see why India has not been able to replicate this (despite starting with a much higher level of wealth and development) then the stupidity being spouted by the moron in this article is a good example.
Funnily enough, he doesn't seem to have too much against outcomes of Western thought processes such as capitalism, self enrichment or any of the technologies he's used to achieve his position in life. No, it's just the bit where workers don't want to have to spend every waking hour enriching their boss that he objects to.
Considering how hard he says he works, he also doesn't seem to have been capable of coming up with any better idea than simply copying ideas that were successful in the "West" that he derides. In fact, even his "work all hours" idea is just a copy of somebody else's idea. How many hours of work does it really take to tell your minions "Copy this thing. Copy that thing"? About 15 minutes a week should be more than enough.
All these "New Rich" types are eagerly foaming at the mouth with how they want to reduce everyone to slave labour rates and work them near to death all for the glory of increased profits for the new suddenly rich types.
It took a lot of hard work and some violence and a whole lot of suffering a century ago to get decent treatment for workers.
It seems history might have to repeat itself.
These New mega rich types are NEVER happy to let others enjoy a decent standard of living or a decent work day or a decent wage, they want it ALL for themselves.
Essentially the world is never enough for these greedy types.
They try to blather on about "virtues" that the people they want to enslave should have to make them happy to be near slaves.
Those same rich have no values at all and are mostly parasites on society.
Don’t worry. The right wing will Hoover up all this inequality and spit out world war 3, we’ll reset the economies again.
As long as you’re rich enough to have a decent bunker, you’ll still be on top when it’s over, just even more rich than before by relative standards. The proles will just be happy to survive and not have their families killed so they’ll get back to that grindstone, they won’t even notice the trick as by relative standards they’ll all be much better off (than dying in under the boot heels of their “enemies”)
Now, who’s turn is it to play choke the peasant?
I have to laugh at all these rich squillionaires buying bunkers in New Zealand etc. Do they think us yokels don't know where they are and will just sit outside peacefully to die? Do they think their paid minions will not stab them in the back and take over their bunkers?
There was a "Mission Impossible" (TV) episode like that, where they scammed some bad dude into believing that WW III had happened, the nukes had dropped, the Earth's surface was a devastated, ash-covered wasteland, and consequently got him to reveal the codes to access his ill-gotten millions, of which they then relieved him of.
Jeeves: "Your wine, sir." (hands master a glass)
Master: "Thank you, Jeeves. You know, it's times like these in which ... in ..." (puts hands to his throat, falls to the floor) "Jeeves! Poison! How ... could you?! You've served me ... so faithfully ... fifty years."
Jeeves: "Yes, Master, I have. And in those fifty years, you never once have given me a pay rise or bonus. As the locals would say in their quaint little way, 'eat shit and die, motherfucker.'"
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