‘Inbox Full Of…’: Death Threats To Indian-American CEO Over 84-Hour Workweeks For Employees

Last Updated:November 18, 2024, 10:07 IST

The Indian-American CEO of a startup received death threats for listing demanding requirements for the job in his company.

Daksh Gupta, an Indian-American CEO of an AI startup Greptile in San Francisco, was subjected to online hate and “death threats” for listing out 84-hour workweeks and “no tolerance for poor work” requirements for working in his company.

Gupta, in a post on X, had detailed the requirements for being hired as part of “transparency” for the prospective employees who would “rather than find out on their first day”.

The post triggered a heated online debate on the work culture in his company, forcing the CEO to come out in his own defence.

What Was The Job Post?

Gupta put out a job interview post on X revealing the demanding requirements to work in his company. He said that he was divulging all the details online for the future employees to know beforehand what they were signing up for and not find out about it on the first day at work.

“Recently I started telling candidates right in the first interview that greptile offers no work-life-balance, typical workdays start at 9am and end at 11pm, often later, and we work saturdays, sometimes also sundays. i emphasize the environment is high stress, and there is no tolerance for poor work. it felt wrong to do this at first but i’m convinced now that the transparency is good, and i’d much rather people know this from the get go rather than find out on their first day. curious if other people do this and if there’s some obvious pitfall i’m missing,” he tweeted.

The tweet went viral and attracted 1.6 million views since November 9.

Users Express Disagreements

Users flooded the comment section with their opinions, expressing disagreements.

“If you can’t figure out the very obvious pitfall here, that’s concerning. It’s a competition question: why would a candidate choose to work for you when you’re asking them to work twice as hard without double the compensation?” a user asked.

“The transparency is fine but the pitfall is that if you offer no work life balance for long enough, employees will churn and affect your progress more. It takes a lot of time to hire and ramp up new engineers so you have to be careful about how hard you work them. You are a founder, they have <1% equity,” another wrote.

“Transparency is great but I’m curious what makes you think this is going to make your company win vs. doing the bare minimum of giving weekends off to increase productivity that can lead to better work in lesser hours? What’s the trade off?” one user asked.

CEO Gets Death Threats

In a separate post, Gupta said that his inbox was full of 20% death threats and 80% job applications.

“Now that this is on the front page of Reddit and my inbox is 20% death threats and 80% job applications, here’s a follow-up,” he posted.

He defended the work requirements in his startup and said, “to everyone who is overworked and underpaid at their software jobs esp outside the US, I feel for you, and I’m sorry this struck a nerve. the people that work here had 6-fig 20 hr/week jobs before this, and can go back to them any time”.

He highlighted though that the demanding requirements were only for short-term due to the startup still being in the early stages and his company would adapt to the industry standards with its expansion.

“this way of working isn’t supposed to be forever because it isn’t sustainable. it’s the first year or two of a startup which is like reaching escape velocity. like people said in the comments, as we mature we’ll hire older, more experienced people who have families and can’t work 100 hours a week, and naturally we would adapt like any good organization,” he said.

Location :

San Francisco, California, USA