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Comment by TaylorGood | Hacker News Reader

Will say this: I met a director from Tesla just after their unveiling of the Model X. She said a small number of people were assigned to fully assemble / prep each vehicle shown that night.. for roughly two weeks they worked 20 hour shifts and slept 2 hours each night. Most teams were working on them right up until the cars rolled on stage; there was still wet paint on one. Also, it was said a "normal" workweek of 16 hours days isn't uncommon..

So, your theory is the story.. she can't wait for options to fully vest and gracefully exit. It's not for lack of thrill, growth, etc. – just that after 3-4 years it is heavily taxing and a pace of sanity is much desired.

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I just don't get how you can be successful doing stuff that way. People with that little sleep are not going to function optimal. They are going to make mistakes.

But both Tesla and SpaceX seems very successful so I wonder if they are successful despite of this or because of this.

Or whether this story is apocryphal, being twice removed from the original workers.

I think it requires strong, perfectionist, top-down leadership. See for example Steve Jobs or James Cameron. They aren't the most popular bosses, but they create amazing things by working their people hard and watching everything very closely.

Additionally, they are incredibly driven and hard working themselves. They expect the same from everyone below them.

Both. They are doing amazing things so they attract awesome people that are dedicated heart and soul. I have a friend who was telling me first hand of their experiences at spaceX and imo it's just a matter of time before some exhausted person makes a mistake and there are huge losses of money and/or life.

Both Tesla and SpaceX have reasonably limited, though dramatic, product failure modes- a car crash or a rocket explosion, respectively. Both have already happened in spades without damaging either's reputation too much. A 1.5x multiplier on engineer hours is worth that kind of risk.

Which is depressing, but it makes sense.

Companies like spaceX tend to have several levels of failover that prevent a single exhausted person's mistake from causing huge problems.

I once lived in a hacker hostel with a girl who was working 16 hour days at Tesla doing embedded systems programming. She said she honestly loved it, got lost in the flow state every day and didn't feel any effects from the sleep deprivation.

These people do exist. (Though maybe not long past early 20s).

I've been in that mode -- it can be fun, as long as you like the work and don't have other responsibilities (family, etc.)

As soon as it starts causing conflict with other areas of your life, it's a fast track to burnout or nervous breakdown.

Also, everyone gets sick of everything eventually. At some point the tasks being done in those 16 hour days will cease to be fun and absorbing and interesting, at which point it becomes a living hell because you have to spend all your time pushing yourself forward, rather than being pulled forward by being fascinated by whatever it is you're working on. It's not sustainable even if there are no conflicts with other areas of your life.

What is "that little sleep"? 16 hours a day leaves 8 hours a day, you can easily fit 6 hours of sleep there.

A mere 6 hours of sleep is a little amount.

Commute there, commute back, shower, eat, say hello to spouse, go to sleep might just take 2 hours, but i wouldn't describe that fit as "easily" (maybe if you live at work).

Remember we're not talking about the exceptional 16h day once in a blue moon but the normal modus operandi over months or years.

Also, 8 hours per night is how much most people like to sleep (and i suspect for good biological reason, long term).

Makes me wonder if companies like that would consider giving people 3-6 months break after big projects and get it into the culture of the company that you should make use of it. Instead of jumping ship people would come back feeling refreshed and if they were drawn to the work in the first place feel the need to fill the hole they have

I'd suggest reading the Elon Musk biography and it will be clear why this will never happen at Space-X and Tesla. It's just not in his DNA to understand the value of family or work-life balance

Adding it to the list.

That was my life for a while doing field service in the power generation industry. Fall through spring are busy with work because power plants make most of their money in the summer so maintenance is done in the off seasons. so we'd get the summer off after working months of 7/12s. Still worked out to a really good yearly salary as well.

There's this narrative that you see a lot of people here express. The narrative is that there are no trade-offs to be made in terms of success and quality of life -- that the most work output you can get from people is also when you ask relatively little of them and dedicate yourself to their happiness.

You should be suspicious of people telling you that the world has no trade-offs, that everything's win-win.

While there is of course a point beyond which trying to work people harder is strictly counterproductive, that point is, for most people, well north of 40 hours a week. It's probably well north of 80 hours a week. Your 81st hour in the week is almost certainly nowhere near as productive as your 35th hour is, but it's probably not negatively productive.

And if you specifically hire for people who can be productive in long weeks, you can definitely find people who can add productivity to the 80th hour and beyond.

Those people may quickly become unhappy. They may eventually (or rapidly) burn out. And you may be a real dick if you ask this of people. But it's one way to get a lot of value, fast.

I don't think that companies ought to routinely ask for very long hours. But that's because I think that it's inhumane, not because the universe has created natural law that says that long working hours remove productivity.

I hear people tell stories like this about successful companies all the time.

If this is really how the game is played. I quit.

Nobody said success was easy or didn't involve sacrifice. Just sayin'

Many years ago I worked as a geologist and watched as a very low-yield gold mine went thru cycles of getting funded, building some infrastructure and then declaring bankruptcy, until finally there was enough infrastructure there to actually make something happen (and maybe the rising gold price helped in the end).

It seems this strategy can be applied in different scenarios/fields and with money, people, money and people... Opens your eyes.

Sprint deployment / critical fixes are one thing, but for a year I did 90+ hour work weeks on a CPG startup and fried myself. More specifically, I was so burnt out on the very thing that was supposed to catapult me to the next level. The concept of positive burnout is very real..

>If this is really how the game is played. I quit.

It's not a game.

I think success, even greatness is possible with a more manageable work/life/sleep balance. It's just far slower and more expensive. SpaceX and Tesla are brute forcing greatness at the expense of a few people that are also impatient for change/success. If they are on-board with the mission, they are probably okay with it until they get their gold and can rest (if they last that long).

Tesla goes from one firefighting to another, it's a place that while growing is not "growing up". End of quarter are always nuts, people are asked to perform miracles and of course quality suffers when everything is a fire. They had some serious rethinking of how the organization works lately so a bunch of people that had a lot of power ended up with considerably less of it, and some new faces are ascending rapidly.

I agree that the situation isn't ideal, but that's what happens when you attempt to compress 100 years of corporate growth into 10-15 years.

I don't work at Tesla, I'm just familiar with the situation through close acquaintances. People are getting REALLY tired of hearing "next quarter will be different and we'll start putting processes in place..."

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