SpaceX worker reveals a brutal company motto helped him survive all-nighters at the office

AP Photo/Evan Vucci, File

Working part time meant working "only" 60 hours a week.

• A former SpaceX employee wrote a Quora post about what it's like to work for Elon Musk.
• His workday was often more than 12 hours.
• Employees used the phrase "You are your own slave driver" to talk about the motivation to work long hours.

Notorious workaholic Elon Musk is so tied to the office that he's been known to sleep on the floor of his factory so he can work nearly around the clock.

So it should come as no surprise that employees at his companies also work long hours.

"I frequently did work 12+ hour days and pulled many all-nighters at the office," former SpaceX employee Josh Boehm wrote in a post on Quora. "A phrase we threw around a lot was, 'You are your own slave driver.'"

The culture at the company included working far in excess of the normal 40-hour work week.

"We would sometimes joke and say, 'What're you, working part time?', when someone was leaving 'early' at like 7 or had only put in a 50-60 hour week," Boehm wrote.

But despite the heavy workload, Boehm said the culture to work around the clock was precipitated by employees, not Musk. And he credits the culture at the company to his current success.

"I was given more responsibility and freedom there than any other company I had worked for, which ultimately became invaluable experience for running my startup company Cyph after leaving," he wrote.

Read Boehm's full post about working at SpaceX »