Work Hard, Live Well
medium.com
medium.com
In a very selfish way, I'm rather thankful for it, though. Being able to outcompete your competition by working less than them is ... nice.
As a side-note: I'd argue that the 40-50 hour thing is even more important for founders. The primary thing that goes pear-shaped if you overwork seems to be decision-making ability. Having a decision-impaired founder is not optimal, to put it mildly.
(I speak from personal, recent experience. Normally I stick rigidly to a 40-50 hour workweek, but last year I decided to crunch for a month to release a film. Looking back, it's pretty obvious that a) my productivity barely increased from what I'd expect of a 40-hour week and b) my ability to make effective strategic decisions took a massive, calamitous plunge. It's entirely possible the film would have been monumentally more successful if I'd stuck to my guns and done one week of crunch at most. )
I'd love to see some research on 20-hour weeks, incidentally. The productivity curve is definitely non-intuitive.
I think you'd find that you'd get useful ideas for work. I think most of the time spent in software is NOT the bashing the keys to make the code. It's spent thinking about what to write, and spending time going down the wrong path.
I at least have a certain clarity when I'm rested that gives me the solution to last night's problems.
Incidentally, that feeds into one thing that I found about 20-hour weeks when I tried them: in many ways they're harder than doing an 80-hour week, because you've got to be so disciplined about always doing the most effective thing in the most effective way.
Often that also means going "what's scaring the crap out of me? Right, let's do that", again and again.
I love this. I think this is going to be my new motto.
Yes, it is a stubborn remnant of the industrial era, where the more time was spent producing widgets, the more widgets were produced.
Software is a completely different animal (that's why I love it)
[ For example, I've worked with a radiology department where the hospital requires technologists to meet performance metrics based purely on scans/hour or they are sent home early before their shift is complete. This would seem to be more directly performance based, but the problem is that the rest of the hospital fails to do pre-scan screening questionaires correctly and doesn't get patients to the scanners on time. It's extremely demoralizing to the staff and more importantly it leaves very expensive hardware sitting around doing absolutely nothing. And the most talented staff actively avoid doing complex proceedures because they take longer. The "bean counters" somehow don't care about the big picture--expensive hardware is left unused and patient care suffers--hardware purchases and staffing are managed by different administrators and overall things are just... not holistically integrated. Anyway... it's complicated. ]
Yes, you can keep making widgets, but you need a new shift of people to do so. That would be an interesting thing for software to explore — a night shift that came in and hacked on your code overnight. Like pair programming, only not.
I never saw a followup article about the effect on the database quality or issues around handing off a code base from team-to-team multiple times a day. I also have to wonder if Oracle still develops its software that way.
That said, continuous development seems to work for open source projects, though typically each module has an owner and other people submit change requests, people don;t just overwrite other developer's code indiscriminately.
Typically, developer's output is (unfortunately) measured by the lines of code written. More often than not, it should be measured by how _few_ lines were written to achieve the desired functionality (including maintainability and scalability, etc)
What is so different about software is that you can get from point A to point B (say, write a custom order processing system) in a thousand different ways (overwhelming choice of technology stacks, architectures, etc). But only a couple of solutions would be optimal for the problem at hand. And there are so many factors which influence all the decisions.
Another difference: code is just a description of what it does. There is no way to accurately predict performance, for example
And don't even get me started on ever-changing requirements ("I know we wanted a 2 story building, but how hard would it be to add 20 more floors?"). You don't change the widget design while on a production line.
Right now it takes skilled craftspeople to design and build good working code - just as a few hundred years ago it took a master woodworker to create a fine chair or bench or bed. There was a million ways to make a join, a million materials to use (woods, glues, metals, etc), and it took a lot of skill to purposefully decide which tools and materials would best fit the job at hand.
This is where software engineering is today.
Look at wood working today:
There are still extraordinarily skilled craftsmen doing work that is miles ahead of what any machine could produce. Real pieces of artwork, in addition to functional pieces of furniture. But the vast majority of woodworking is done by automation (be that machines or laborers)
That is likely the future of software engineering.
Because what most people/businesses need out of software is exactly what they need of furniture - they need it to be 'good enough' and to not have to spend a lot of resources fussing over it.
With SaaS and thousands of pre-packaged solutions, entire industries are beginning to flip over
How long ago was it that to have a website a company would need a webmaster and some developers?
How long ago was it that to run email, FTP, website, etc you would need to purchase hardware, and employees to manage that hardware and software?
Hell even personal websites - you no longer need to know a word of any programming language in order to spin up your very own website, you can even get 'good enough' layouts from the provided templates.
Lets not forget that building websites was (and is) a very real and very lucrative field. It was overtaken by millions of amatuer kids who learned a little html and css and sold websites for a fraction of the cost of hiring professionals. And it worked because businesses want something 'good enough'
I;ve said this before but the same thing has/is happened to many other respected fields:
Photography
travel agent
Technical support (call centers, geek squad, etc)
I don't really see how software is any different from any other trade. You solve enough major problems until you get to a point where 'good enough' is easily accomplished by automation or laymen. Seems to me that this change is already occurring.
Remember all those CASE tools that replaced the need to write programs? You just describe the problem and out comes the software. Business People can do it. (But you still need to describe the problem in the exact level of detail as the program your tool outputs, and now you have to do it using that funky tool).
Remember when all our jobs got offshored to India to be done for $10/hour? They seem to have come back, along with all the $10/hour guys over there who could actually do the work (and who are all now getting paid market wages over here). Over the years, that happened to all the "offshore" there is, and today you really don't want to have your product built by the remaining offshore guys who can't command more than $50/hour.
Costs of running a software business did in fact go down from $1M/year in server and licensing to $5/month for a Digital Ocean slice, but the actual work of writing software still requires programming computers. And that is still hard, and hard to find people who can do.
So we're still here. My money is on us still being here ten years from now.
The key difference is you need a carpenter to make chairs, but you need an engineer to make a chair factory.
You need a software developer to make software, but you need a software developer to make a software factory.
This also means there's a pyramid is place. The software devs have built a website builder? Okay, so the kids take over that part. But your website builder startup is now more successful. He needs to add some features, some big data, some better tools, advertisement. So he needs... more software developers.
Outside the website builder, other things are getting easier too. So people are building things on top of those things. Everyone's got a phone with GPS and internet now, and computing power is cheap, as is storage, so there's an Uber, there's an AirBnb, there's all sorts of things that are built on top of previously difficult things.
It's software developers all the way down.
It's exactly your sort of thinking that means the industry keeps working the way it is
The way studies work is to measure the average of a large group. Most people I assume (I don't have data to back that up) work in jobs that do not have what jkot meant with "good conditions". So the research finds that _on average_ longer work hours do not result in more work done, and that is good advice for every employer.
For a motivated individual or small group that can be different, so I believe such personal accounts and would not tell them they are wrong. I can totally see how founders, special personalities, people with what I call the "perfect job" can work much longer than 40 hours without being wrong about their own performance.
The wrong thing is only to expect that from others or to create an environment that makes others believe it would be true for them too.
http://ericdodds.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/graphing-per...
It's possible that some special individuals can work longer hours than average without productivity loss. However, without hard data to prove you're one of those individuals, given the above, it may be inadvisable to simply assume you are...
So look around you - of the 20 people who are working late hours with you and believe they are still productive, 10 of them are wildly unproductive, quite possibly to the point of contributing disproportionally negative productivity due to writing bugs.
Is the additional 400 man-hours of productive work worth those 400-800 man-hours spent debugging problems which could have been avoided?
If you mean "I can socialise and network and that counts as work", I don't think that's what comes over in your original post.
I find it quite hard to work 70 hours/week even if my work is very well organized (my main productivity drain) and I'm working at home, with my own setup in an environment I crafted for being distraction-free and really comfortable.
I can work for at most a week at the pace of 70 hours/week, after that I know I'll really drop my productivity even when I'm liking what I'm doing and truly motivated...
That's my personal experience after my first 9 years in the industry, having worked on open plan offices, team-rooms offices and at home for a couple of years.
So I left to work in Higher Education where people complain about the workload and I just laugh. 40 hr work weeks, fun people to work with, and only a few crazy schedules. We even have time to have a cup of coffee and chat.
My health has improved dramatically, my kids actually now think I'm a good dad and my wife and I have time for each other.
I got my life back. took a big pay cut, never looked back. Life is too short to over commit for someone else.
My boss is retiring on June and she has no outside interests. No golf, no card playing, no anything. She works 70+ hours and has for years and claims she loves her job. I think as the daughter of a 3 star army general, she loves being responsible. She sets a bad example for balance and I think her love for work is more a fear or what is beyond work for her. I'm 2 to 4 years away from retiring and I have a lot of interests (maker, mentor of k12, concerts, travel, learning to draw...). I love what I do but I love the weekend more.
Isn't it so odd that doing good work efficiently is always "rewarded" with yet more work to do. In my experience it creates a perverse incentive for workers to just drag their feet.
The counter-point to that is you can balance that out by having quality controls such as unit tests and code reviews. If someone writes shitty code then it'll be pretty obvious and they should be corrected.
I was in similar situation, working 50-55 hours a week for US corps and it was taking its toll on me. I think the American dream makes people think that work is the the only goal in life.
Then I moved to Europe and boy what a change! People here work 32-40 hours max and take bucket loads of vacation. The quality of work these guys produce is really top notch too.
I wish more people understand that working to death isn't a healthy choice.
Just DO NOT work for game studios. The lesson I learned from friends who lived that life is NEVER EVER, unless you're in charge and have enough capital to burn on a creative venture. In that branch people do work for 48 hours, sleep at the office and generally run on constant crunch time to ship at a specific date.
By law its 4 weeks minimum in Germany, too (more if you are younger than 18). But many industries gained 6 weeks through collective bargaining/unions.
Let me guess: you didn't move to the UK? Generalising about Europe is difficult.
I know people on a 42.5 hour contract, 1/2 hour lunch! My last job was 9am-6pm with 1 hour lunch (40 hour contract (plus 1 hour commute each way)). I'm now happily on a 37.5 hour contract with 1 hour lunch.
And most full time UK workers are 40 or 37.5 hours, which is still well below what many US workers report their hours as.
[1] https://www.gov.uk/holiday-entitlement-rights/entitlement
(This includes bank holidays, typically companies will mandate the bank holidays and give 20 days to be chosen freely.)
Half the time, the UK pretends it's not part of Europe, and the other half of the time, complains for not being included.
I think we both knew that GP meant "continental Europe". ;)
Germany. But I've heard from friends and family in NL, Spain and PT that it's similar laid back attitudes in those countries too. No idea about UK, but I've heard they've ~25 vacation days too.
There's more use of abusive stuff like zero hour contracts.
Take a look at investment banking, the ultimate waste of productive capacity. My roommate did this until his boss killed himself, providing a bit of a wakeup call.
He'd go to work in the morning, sit around all day, and then the boss would get back from meetings and ask for some presentation to be made. By the next morning. Stay up until midnight/2am, ie dinner at work and cab home, repeat. Every day, including weekends.
Nobody who did this thought it made any sense, but people did it anyway. They wanted to climb the greasy pole.
That is so sad it almost makes me weep. I am thankful every day that I get to both work with cutting-edge tech, being productive, and also have a very healthy work/life balance.
They're not workers locked in a garment factory with no fire exits or immigrants crossing the desert in the hope of finding a job to feed their family.
Undoubtably a big reason why salaried staff are overworked: the extra hours are free to the company. It would be interesting to see how long "long hours" culture would last if every single staff hour over 40 hours a week had to be paid for. (Once we got past all the insistence that employees falsify timesheets, of course).
The flip side of that is that every extra hour you work, you are devaluing your own compensation by working for free.
Well, my friend decided to continue to pull crazy hours and every Friday afternoon at 4:30 (when the boss went home) he went up to the boss and said, "Here. Sign this. These are my hours for the week." They boss (not being too bright) just signed it week after week after week.
Eventually a year went by and my industrious friend went up to the HR department and said, "Here are all of my time sheets for the year. My boss agreed to giving me time off in lieu. Here's his signature on every sheet. I've put in 80 hours a week for a year. Now I want a year off".
Of course they couldn't give it to him. After consulting with their lawyer they gave him time and a half (pro rated on his salary). Then they went to our boss and made a special rule for our team. Nobody was to work overtime again. Ever.
Everybody was happy. Except for my boss :-)
When I used to sling burgers, etc, my employers would regularly retroactively clock me out for breaks I wasn't allowed to take. We were clocked out when our shifts were supposed to have ended, regardless of when we were allowed to leave.
It was normal to work 10-12 hours and get paid for 7 (at $4.75 & $5.15, none-the-less). If you report it, you're fired and blacklisted.
While I was under 18, I would be clocked out at 11pm on any school weeknight (state law). The catch was that I was on closing shift, so I couldn't leave (locked doors) until we were through -- usually ~1am. 2 hours per-night unpaid, plus a 30 minute deduction from my pay for a break I was never allowed to take.
All of that is illegal under a variety of state and federal laws. However, enforcement of those laws is either non-existent or is a tiny slap on the wrist ($500 fine for stealing an aggregate of ~$10,000 in wages over a year in the case of one place I worked at that was finally caught).
I'm getting on a tangent, but my main point is unpaid extra work is rampant among hourly employees as well as salaried.
I completely agree with your premise, but I think we'd see the same problems come up in a different form. Fixing that problem requires putting at least some bargaining power back in the hands of employees, and that's difficult in most places.
Yeah. It's the other kind of "black" economy, where profit relies on defrauding the employees because they have no power. The people doing it probably tell themselves and their friends that they're making money through hard work and the virtue of long hours.
The extra hours are NOT free to the company.
Ok they don't pay for them in money, but also don't gain anything in additional work being done. In the extreme case they loose productivity, people get sick, people quit etc, which is a very real cost for the company.
The research is uncontroversial by now (many studies point to the same conclusion).
The trick is maximising those precious 40-50 hours and I think that's where we've gone up and down, backwards and forwards as an industry over the years. We've ended up with a lot of shoddy tooling and unnecessary complexity with our programming paradigms.
Only in the past year have I managed to figure out a way to work 50 hr weeks with the right tooling/programming language and have increased my output! And only by meeting someone else who had made the same mistakes I was making and then helped me discover what I was doing wrong.
Quite enlightening when I was on the verge of quitting the industry because I just kept thinking "this has to be so much simpler than how I'm doing it" and not really knowing how to make it so.
Who cares if taking care of yourself makes you a better employee (it might not). Your life is more important than your employer's shareholder value.
You're competing on quality (or at least you should be). Being as good at what you do as you are makes you valuable. And you can get more done in 40 hours than those other clowns do in 120.
Let other people fight to be the cheapest and the most willing to be exploited. You're the guy the smart companies go to when they need somebody truly good.
For the last 9 months, I've spend 60-80 of those hours each week putting conscious attention to items directly related to founding my company. Let's call that "work."
But you can also call it "creation." Most of this time I am outside my self. What is being drained or used?
What is different in the time I am not "creating"? My mind is still doing things. What is the difference between "writing the marketing section of the business plan" and "reading a novel"? Does one use less mental energy than the other? I've read so many novels in my life, I'm tired of them. I don't like the way they lock my mind into their train of thought. Reading the novel becomes draining. TV is pure hell. Better to create, to engage in the intricate dance of love and passion with my Muse.
I do take a nice nap in the middle of most days. And it is nice to watch the birds flying in the valley, to lift big heavy things, and to eat good steak.
How do you figure? Dustin was a FB Founder and is saying he would have been more effective with less hours. He, and the examples he cites in the article, are literally the best examples of "privileged few."
I certain understand the pain and frustration you feel. In my 20s I spent some 6 months homeless. I've begged for money for food. It was a long and very painful road up from there. Many bullshit jobs. I would not have made it without some help.
When you live at the margins of society, you learn some things about societal constructs such as "work." The distinction between the "part you sell" and the part you do not sell is not so distinct.
This is it exactly. Someone told me recently: "To make it huge in business, it needs to also be your hobby." That rung really true for me as a founder. My "work" now used to be the thing I did when I got off of work at the end of the day. Now I get to do it all the time and it's great, why would I want to do anything else?
Now, the question is, for non-founders or employees, should we expect them to be as engaged etc... to the same degree as the founder. I think the answer is "it depends."
I mentioned this elsewhere but I firmly think that Bezos/Jobs etc... all want to hire people who are as passionate about their work as a founder is. So that's who they structure the company around.
you can try to aim same type of people like yourself for hiring, but after few headcounts this gets really hard. you either provide extra cash motivation, or promise (and delivery) to work on something amazing.
What you describe is the mercenary style approach - "Well, I've been fucked over before so pay me!" - and I think that is totally valid mindset, if cynical.
The reality is though that for some problem sets or types of work, the work transcends the tangible benefits. I have to fall back on my time in the military for this one because I have innumerable examples of people who have absolutely dedicated their lives to their military job and what they have to show for it from that perspective is a broken body and a relative pittance; but you couldn't pay them enough to leave because they love it so much.
So it's not always just about hard compensation.
Ah, there's the rub. The people I am talking about are those who join a company so that they can do for a salary what they would be doing anyway without one.
For example we just "hired" someone for only equity because we were working on a really hard hardware problem that he has been playing with in his part time. He approached us and suggested coming on board - in fact he did a TON of work before I even asked him to and before we had any compensation agreements in place - in fact I was the one who pushed him to let us compensate him in the best way we have available right now because he is stuck at another job.
Maybe you don't actually care about what you do, or believe in it or whatever, but there do exist those who do and want to work on it.
Woz is the best example of this.
Don't get me wrong--I care about what I do. So much so that I put a price on it. If anything, someone who is willing to do 90 hour weeks while getting compensated at a level appropriate for 40 hours cares LESS about what he does, as he is cheapening his profession.
Not that they would or should work for free, but that there are, as I said, intangible reasons that people join projects and work 80 hour weeks that aren't just compensation.
They have nothing to lose by getting off the train, and thus the amount of leverage they have is enormous.
Most people need to put a roof on their heads, which is why those things rarely happen.
If that is really true, what does it say about people who are working full-time _and_ trying to do a project on the side?
Are all the people who successfully do that outliers? To have a successful side project do you need to spend less time doing actual work at work? Is there a ticking time-bomb once you start working on a side project (effectively entering a "crunch time"), where after a certain amount of time you're doomed to fail unless you take a break?
1. Can anyone name a company on par with Amazon/Uber/SpaceX/Goog etc... where everyone is working 9-5? Not doubting they exist, it just seems like all the major high growth big vision companies have this same ethos. Maybe they are successful despite that, but that would seem anti-pattern
2. There is a subset of people who do not lose productivity after 40/50/60 hours a week (full disclosure I think I am one of these as my work weeks look closer to 80-90) and I think that is who these companies are optimizing for. Amazon doesn't care if it burns out 10 people if it can keep one that is super passionate and can work like a madman.
Not saying that everybody should work 80 hours, just that this whole 'working more than 50 hours is less productive than working 40' is one of those extraordinary claims that require extraordinary evidence.
Because looking at the empirical evidence, it's the companies where people work long, hard hours are the successful ones, and not just in software... Try walking into a Cravath partner meeting, or John Hopkin's neurosurgery ward, and propose people go home after 40 because it would make them 'better' - you'd get laughed out of the room, is where I'd put my money.
I think there is value in companies that are 9-5, but those are not $BN high impact companies. The only major organizations with those hours are select government agencies.
Can we try a little harder than evidence-free correlation/causation here?
A quick look at the world's largest companies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_by_r... reveals that the secret of being in the top 10 for success is to be in oil&gas, or to be Walmart. Most Walmart employees are paid by the hour and subject to varying schedules outside their control. The highest tech company is Apple at 17.
Speaking of hourly pay, that is undoubtably a big reason why salaried staff are overworked: the extra hours are free to the company. It would be interesting to see how long "long hours" culture would last if every single staff hour over 40 hours a week had to be paid for. (Once we got past all the insistence that employees falsify timesheets, of course)
I'm not even talking about field jobs though. Analysts, developers and white collar workers inside Exxon are generally expected to put in massive hours.
I'm a geologist and I've worked for three of the majors. I've seen good work conditions and I've seen terrible. (This is all office-based work, too. Things are a _lot_ rougher in the field.)
Essentially all geologists are in the "upstream" side of things (i.e. finding oil/gas and getting it out of the ground). Upstream has three segments (exploration, development, and production), and the work-culture depends a lot on which one of those you're in.
At least in my experience, in exploration things are very schedule-driven. You work crazy hours all the time to meet arbitrary deadlines. Supposedly, we work a 9/80 schedule and get every other Friday off. No one is allowed to take those... It's 7-5 six days a week, and more when it's crunch time. Taking "vacation" means working from home or only coming in for half a day. We're required to code our vacation every year, but I've regularly seen people forced to work through 100% of their vacation time.
Development (oilfield development, not software) is typically a bit more paced. Most of the work will be on a very regular schedule, except for when you're responsible for a well that's being drilled. If you're sitting a well, you're on-call 24/7 for a few weeks. You will have lots of 10pm, 2am, and 6am conference calls and then go in and work a full day. However, you'll typically be told to not show up at the office for a week or so afterwards (that's always informal -- the majors all have strict no comp time rules).
The other segment of upstream is production. I've never worked production, so I can't comment there.
I'm currently in R&D (software development, actually), and it's much more relaxed. We have our own personal hell in terms of the amount of paperwork and meetings that are required to do _anything_, but the hours are more reasonable.
At any rate, the big companies are all effectively 20-50 semi-independent small companies, in my experience. The work culture between those small companies will vary wildly.
e.g. In software, in my 80th hour, I could quite easily write some code that was bad, that takes longer than an hour to work out is bad. Code that wouldn't have been written wrong if I had been thinking clearly. Hence is net negative in terms of productivity.
(not saying that the point at which productivity goes negative at the 80h mark however.
I am also not writing code - which I think people just assume is the case. My role as founder is super varied, so in any given day I will do a meeting or two with investors, calls with the CTO, hangout meetings, design sessions, "brainstorming" or whatever you want to call a creative process, recruiting, reading industry news, reviewing financial statements, calls with customers, customer support emails, building presentations etc... I spread this out from about 830 AM to 1 AM with most of the work from 830AM - 5PM Break for dinner and family time from 5 - 830/9 then do some of the lighter work again from 9PM - 1 AM.
That works for me and my family. I have worked in much more stressful environments and can tell you for a fact that there is no dip in productivity - if anything, working less makes me antsy.
Edit: I do respect your work ethic, again I know I sound like a smart ass; but I'm just trying to understand. I couldn't physically work those hours and handle all of my responsibilities.
I met my wife in college and we had our three kids before I became a founder. We outsource a lot of the "maintenance" (lawn care, home repair, taxes) but I usually spend an hour of my day cleaning the kitchen.
Son's baseball means no dinner that night?
Yea, actually. We have to be really flexible with our family activities.
At any point in the day we are overloaded, which is fine with us but we have found ways to prioritize what we need to make it work. For example my wife goes rowing right after our kids go to sleep while I work and I respond to any kids if they wake up for a few hours.
It's just a super complicated juggling act.
good for you (but only if rest of your family truly agrees), but to me, you describe pretty much a nightmare. the few guys (in non-founder area) that were so super-performant, and were godsend for their employers, were actually shitty partners, friends and fathers. Your health is a good indicator if your mind is not stretching things too far. And last thing - for most women, it doesn't count how much time you spend with them, it's the time without, lack of intimacy that moves them into distance in relationships.
Try refactoring the linux kernel for 90 hours a week. Good luck.
No company that is trying to do massive huge game changing things are 9-5. That also counts for big projects (Apollo, Manhattan etc...) that have out-sized goals.
In terms of revenue? Volkswagen had a revenue of about EUR 200 billion in 2014. In Germany (where 200.000 of Volkswagens employees work), working hours are 32 hours at Volkswagen proper, and up to 40 hours at Audi, Porsche etc.
And Volkswagen is a profitable company (in contrast to Uber and Amazon...).
It's obviously not true in all jobs, but after hearing this so many times, it might be time I try a stint in Europe just for the experience.
Economics students will understand that a rational actor will consume a free thing until the marginal utility of the next unit is zero.
And for a company, the marginal utility of your time is NEVER, EVER Zero. Unless you're a pilot, maybe, or the control room operator of a nuclear plant.
So, even if you're 10% as productive as normal,that's still incremental labor at no additional cost.
But for you, that negative utility affects your health, your family, etc.
The solution is serious and strict laws that prevent employer abuse, and to prevent young people from killing themselves and undermining the value of all labor. They used to be called unions, but I'll settle for government regulation.
Another option is to start your own business, where you decide these things; or to work as a consultant and get paid by the hour. It's AMAZING how much more efficient some of these startups are, or get, when you charge them hourly.
When you give your labor away for free you devalue it, and everyone else's around you.
If anything, I'm reading the opposite of that - that it's entirely possible to work "hard" without working for extremely long hours.
You can spend your workday distracting yourself with Facebook, or cat gifs, making awkward water-cooler small talk with other people who, like yourself, are counting the hours until you go home. This is terribly unfulfilling.
On the other hand, you can spend your workday - the same amount of time, or even less - focused and productive, getting things done, effecting meaningful change. Too busy to agonize over the clock, you're pleasantly surprised by the end of the workday. You feel you've done things worth doing - that you haven't simply wasted your day on pointless drivel.
I would call the latter "working hard". Taking this definition of "Working hard", I wonder if it's not a prerequisite of living well.
For me it is "hard" to simply give 100% with no distractions to my fullest potential for 8 hours. I can't even do that for 8 hours most days, so why expect me to do it for 12 or even longer, there would quickly be a negative ROI like the article suggest. I think most people experience work most of the time more or less like that.
On the other hand on days where everything is just right (also on the weekend with non work related tasks I'm exited about) and I'm in the flow, hours do not matter much, and I'm pretty sure I get a positive return from more hours. At least in the short term, I never had the honour to have such a perfect job to experience that daily for months to know about the long term.
That is to say that I could see that for somebody a) with a different personality to shut out distractions, has naturally better motivation or more energy etc or b) with a "perfect" job, it could be or at least feel different. It might be/feel so easy to work fully concentrated for 8 or more hours that "working hard" has to be something even more for them.
> For me it is "hard" to simply give 100% with no distractions to my fullest potential for 8 hours.
Working hard's not easy, and something I continue to try and figure out how to optimize further. I use small wagers (e.g. coffee) with coworkers to help with motivation, noise canceling headphones and asynchronous communication (IRC, email) to help minimize flow disruptions, website blocks to break idle browsing habits, task lists and breakdowns to help eliminate "uhh... what next?" indecision, single-tasking as much as possible...
Friends and new tech I can sometimes integrate into work, but yeah, not always.
> I can't even do that for 8 hours most days, so why expect me to do it for 12 or even longer, there would quickly be a negative ROI like the article suggest.
At this point, I'll push back hard on management that asks me for more than 8 hours, and it's a serious consideration when job hunting. I'm willing to, on occasion, put more than that in - if I'm convinced the occasion warrants sacrificing long term productivity for some very short term gains - but I'm not willing to let it become a pattern.
Even then, at 12 hours, I'm typically a mindless zombie suitable for little more than manual input fuzzing (read: mindlessly spamming inputs), running build scripts that were prepared and debugged earlier, and uploading build artifacts. I'm not even productive short term for most work tasks anymore. Even bug fixes may do more harm than good.
I've even managed to frame it as an ethics issue to myself: Allowing my employer to repeatedly sacrifice my long term productivity for extremely short term gains is doing wrong by myself, and doing wrong by my employer. Worst case scenario, if (respectfully) standing up to management gets me fired, or turns the work environment toxic, I have another opportunity to find a job that appreciates my work instead of my self-flagellation.
I'd say it's written from the perspective of someone who's already seen a lot of success and wealth in his life and now has the luxury of writing about how to live well.
I (and I assume many other founders in the startup world) work about 70 to 80 hours a week. I feel responsibility for my business. If s*t isn't done on a Friday afternoon and people are waiting for it I'm not going to say "Well it's home time. See you on Monday". That's just not how it works.
If it's 6pm or 7pm on a Friday and you have worked 80 hours that week, and you need to work more, then you've scheduled something wrong or management has.
And, if you're a founder, who is imparting a culture of leaving to get rest on a Friday evening is not ok, or working 70-80 hour weeks is the norm, then good luck with that culture when people turn resentful.
Respecting yourself and your life and your employees lives while trying to be successful ... that's how it works.
*General "you", not necessarily rsp1984
My employees have regular 40 hour work weeks.
Oh man, I am really glad to live in Europe.
Specially insurances will not be covering certain work related diseases with that type of workload.
It has been a continuous discussion in the press in the last years, to the point some companies started enforcing a "go home" policy.
For example, sorry in German,
http://www.spiegel.de/karriere/berufsleben/erreichbar-nach-d...
In Germany there are laws that limit how many hours one is allowed to do continuously each month.
Report the working conditions to Arbeitsamt.
Knowing the law is quite valuable and abuse only works when everyone keeps quiet.
It helps when companies play by the rules with the Works Council and the respective unions.
And yes, I am one of those guys that would disclose bad working conditions to the Arbeitsamt.
If you haven't, what do you expect would happen if you did?
From experience, I can tell you that things will work out fine. You'll get your product shipped, support your customers, and have roughly the same chance of surviving if you work sane hours.
When I was crunching to ship Twiddla, I would average between 20 and 30 hours per week. About the same amount of time I dedicated to Rock Climbing, wandering the streets of Pamplona, and sipping wine on the balcony watching the world go by with my girlfriend. Every work day I would come in fresh, with a good idea of what needed building, go heads down in the morning and come up for air around 3pm to find a cold half cup of morning coffee on my desk, next to a cold lunch that my girlfriend had evidently snuck in and deposited at some point.
That was the most productive year of my life. I shipped a product that pays for my lifestyle today. And I never worked more than 40 hours in a single week.
I'd recommend you give that a shot. It sounds a lot more enjoyable than what you're doing.
Look, I am not complaining about my situation. I signed up for this. I like what I do. I just get really sick when people claim "you are going to be sooo much more productive" if you work less. Like it was a general truth. Like they are an authority and know better. Like it applied to everyone and everything at all times. Like there was no need to look at a particular situation and then decide if it's a statement that's actually more than a phrase.
And btw I would really appreciate it if people wouldn't down-vote my comments just because they disagree. That would make this community just a whole lot better.
"Fool," scolded the Maggid. "Go home and eat meat and other delicacies. Drink aged wine. If you don't, I am not finished with you yet!"
Later, the Maggid's disciples wondered why their master spoke as he did. Rabbi Israel explained: "If the rich man dines on meat and wine, then he would at least feel that the paupers in his town should be given bread and salt. But if he himself subsists on dry bread and salt, he might think that poor people could live on stones..."
Let's not have an echo chamber here.
I think the problem here is: Why are people waiting for it? Why can't they wait until Monday?
Usually the reason for this is simple: You scheduled something important (eg. a deploy or a release) to a Friday or a Thursday. If you force yourself to schedule important stuff to Mondays, you'll see things running much more smoothly (even if everything breaks down, you probably have enough time to have it fixed by Wednesday).
That is a ridiculous argument. "We shouldn't do this thing, because women are incapable of doing it". Maybe women aren't physically capable of working in high-pressure fields.
"Economically, you can think of a startup as a way to compress your whole working life into a few years. Instead of working at a low intensity for forty years, you work as hard as you possibly can for four. This pays especially well in technology, where you earn a premium for working fast."