Do people still think you can get away with 40-50 hours when the next guy is just as good as you and putting in 80?
When you are in a startup that has found a market, and all you have to do is ship the next MVP and you can start printing money, you're pretty motivated to work weekends to make that happen faster, even if it's a bad idea.
I would guess that these successful startups could stop working weekends, change their culture to focus on measuring value and deliverables, and still be successful.
That's good weekend work; they happened because of success so they don't have the same mental load and they tend to be sporadic so you get recovery time.
Bad weekend work is caused by relentless internal pressure. That's counter-productive.
I think the real key is recognizing when working more will help.
There are several common themes to why all those companies had to put in crazy hours but one theme that sticks out is the "oh shit, the user count is growing like crazy and we've got to scale out our servers to handle the exponential workload like YESTERDAY or we're going to DIE!"
It happened to the Youtube engineers, Google, Napster, Etsy, etc. It's a stressful combination of fighting fires and adding capacity at the same time.
For horizontal scaling re-architecting & re-engineering, there is no commercial off-the-shelf or open-source software that let's you install it in one afternoon such that all programmers can just work 40 hours a week without a hiccup. Today, you can't just install a distributed database like Cassandra and fire up more AWS instances and assume those newer technologies that the previous Founders at Work didn't have will prevent your employees from putting in 80 hour weeks for months.
Going from a single instance database to handle 10k to 100k users to a sharded distributed db to handle 100 million is not going to be a 40-hour a week job for startup employees. If any companies have done it with zero overtime, please write a blog highlighting your user traffic growth, database sizes, and migration strategy. That would be a very impressive achievement.
There is a place for hard work. And it is certainly a factor in success, but working nights and weekends only gets you so far and there is a significant diminishing return. Go through a code base and look at commits made past midnight, or 8+ hours into a shift. They are going to lead to more regression issues and technical debt nine times out of ten.
Considering all the tone-deaf ham-fisted nonsense that's come out about Mayer's management style while she was at yahoo, I'm surprised people will still listen to this nonsense. It's just a bunch of people following their selection bias into a cult of personality.
There are people who can be productive (and happy) working more than 40 hours a week.
I very very much doubt you can when it comes to programming. I've been doing this for almost two decades and in this time have only known ONE person who might fit the bill.
20, 40, 80 hours...doesn't matter, getting a group of programmers excited and passionate about getting a taxi from point A to point B is probably unlikely.
But get a group of people who grew up playing D&D and tell them to make it real...
Now, if everyone would make ideal strategic choices and the whole thing would be a zero-sum game, then I'd agree with you, the ones that put in more time would reap more benefit. But looking around me (admittedly, far away from SV, in a backwater Eastern European country), that doesn't look to be the case.
Quick count, how many of you (us) are reading HN and counting that in work time?
What really creates value is smart, prophetic strategy and effective management. Hours are a resource guided by strategy and management, not an end in themselves.
If your strategy is clueless and your management is intrusive, all you're doing is wasting everyone's time - and 80 hour weeks won't help you.
They are there for 3 reasons.
1) They are passionate about their product. 2) They have an 'oh shit' deadline due soon. 3) They had nothing else better to do and enjoy their coworkers.
I've been in the all 3 situations before. To believe being there on a weekend for one reason, and one reason only, shows her myopia. If her indicator of success is the # of hours you put in, it explains why her turnaround failed...
I do agree that you can't code for 80 hours straight for weeks on end, but "80 hours of work" isn't necessarily that. I also agree that it's still stressful even so, and I wouldn't recommend living that way for years on end, but younger folk can afford it for a while.
How would you expect that person to have less physical issues?
Marriage/Family: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jomf.12320/abstra...
Mental Health: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22995130
Physical Health: http://oem.bmj.com/content/58/1/68.full
At least in my experience, no amount of pride or grit can prevent you from crumbling if you do this for more than a few weeks. The physical aspects are somewhat noticeable but can be mitigated with a little exercise, good posture, alternating work positions, and so on. I found the real price is paid mentally. You lose control of your emotions and work becomes the center of your world to an unhealthy degree. A frustration that impedes your work becomes a mental disaster. You lose a sense of who you are, drowned in the work. You start to take pride in being this code machine. I sleep very little as it is, and can only imagine the havoc this would wreak one somebody who needs their 6-8 hours.
When you surface, the return to reality can be jarring and embarrassing. It happens when the project fails, or is hugely delayed for causes outside of your control, or the business is acquired, or what have you: The reality sets in that you were burning the candle at both ends and getting upset for absolutely no reason. You realize that your pride, your perceived grit, not only was futile with regard to the project, but was really a protective mechanism. Vanity carried the day. That is just plain crushing for your self-esteem, and I wouldn't wish it on anybody.
Also, and Carmack nails it, people are different. You might think it's unhealthy, or unnatural, but some people are obsessive, perfectionist, focused or just really passionate about something. Also, some people are just better organized. Again, Carmack's right, you probably can't be at your peak for extended periods of time, but there's plenty of things you can get done that don't require your peak.
When this issue is raised from concern of people being taken advantage of, fine, I agree. But just because some people can't do it, doesn't mean no one can (just look at the extreme range of physical and creative abilities that people have). And, like all other life style choices, what's the point of judging other people?
Keep in mind that I'm the sort of person you are indicating already. I sleep little and don't care much about work/life balance. When I've worked on teams that are burning the candle at both ends, I am able to hold out longer than others and usually end up carrying things over the finish line.
That's the point of my comment: Even for those who ought to thrive, things start to break down, and no amount of energy or toughness changes that. We are human. I want to warn/remind other engineers that these practices are unsustainable. Hell, I want to remind myself of that after repeating this work to the bone/burnout cycle so many times.
In a startup, your competitive advantage is rarely going to be how many hours you work - how can it be, when you're playing against large well-capitalized companies that can assign entire teams at the drop of a hat and thereby outwork you tenfold? Rather, you rely on some combination of:
- underdoing the competition (you can't do everything as 1-10 people, so you have to fail and iterate quickly with minimal effort and learn as much as you can from each iteration); - personal / professional connections (OK, so you can spend more time here, but it's often not going to be behind a computer or at the office, and it will be very hard to measure productivity-wise); - blind luck (which isn't in your control anyways, so don't waste your time trying); - the innovator's dilemma (which isn't really in your control either, but gives you a several-year headstart while larger companies slowly figure out that your market is lucrative enough for them to bother with).
Finally: from personal experience, the productivity gains of working 80 hour weeks are illusory. I make more mistakes, incur more technical debt, work on fewer of the right problems and more of the wrong ones, take on stress that impacts my decision-making and communication skills...
[1] http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2014/12/working-... [2] https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs181/projects/crunc... [3] http://ftp.iza.org/dp8129.pdf
In other words, success for one startup doesn't mean success for another (let alone personal success). Working weekends doesn't mean you'll succeed, and vice versa. And working crazy hours doesn't mean that's why you succeeded.
> Do people still think you can get away with 40-50 hours when the next guy is just as good as you and putting in 80?
The 80-hour guy's personal ROI is half that of the 40-hour guy. Meaning the return has to be twice as good to justify his additional time investment. This is great for the company, but terrible for the individual.
Dieing of a stress-induced heart attack at 35 isn't winning at life.