Three years of 12-hour days, and a psalm about sleep

Almost everyone who has built something worth having gave it too many hours for a while, so the hours are the wrong place to start. The better question is what they're for. On October 15, Vinod Khosla, the 71-year-old investor who co-founded Sun Microsystems, posted an opening for a chief of staff. The job is in person in Menlo Park, "generally from 8 am to 8 pm," with nights and weekends on call, for three years. Critics called it indentured servitude, yet a spokeswoman expects more than 1,000 applications. Late Friday, he walked it back, a little: "Jokes aside honest truth is this job has no specific hours requirement but is intense. I work 80 hours/week and this person needs to keep up."

People who hate hustle culture might expect the Bible on their side. Jacob served his uncle Laban twenty years in all. Seven were for Rachel, and seven more came after Laban tricked him at the wedding. Looking back on the whole stretch, he told Laban it was heat by day, frost by night, and "my sleep fled from my eyes" (Genesis 31:40). Yet here is how Genesis tells the first seven, the years for Rachel, as they pass:

Genesis 29:20Jacob served seven years for Rachel. They seemed to him but a few days, for the love he had for her.

The psalm has no quarrel with long days either. Its title gives it to Solomon, the king who built the temple, and pilgrims sang it on the road up to Jerusalem. It opens in verse 1 with builders and night watchmen, and it never tells them to put down their tools. It says the house stands only if God builds it. The late nights it calls vain belong to someone who has forgotten that, who eats his bread worried, as if the walls would fall the moment he lay down.

Jacob and the psalm's builder lose the same sleep, and only one of them is afraid.

That's the question for Khosla's thousand would-be applicants. Jason Fried, who runs 37signals and dislikes hustle culture, said the terms are "very clear" and that at 25 "maybe it'd be the best thing in the world." Past chiefs of staff have gone on to found companies and launch funds, and the consultant Raheela Anwar called that exit the real draw. In a better market, she said, "these people might have had a lot more options." In this no-hire one, three hard years are a hedge, and that's an old and honest trade. But what it buys is safety later, and safety is the one thing the psalm says another hour awake can't buy.

Long years can feel like a few days when they're spent on someone you love. Spent trying to hold the house up yourself, they take your sleep and never give it back.