“There is no justifiable reason to be working 100+ hours a week." | Hacker News Reader

“There is no justifiable reason to be working 100+ hours a week."

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81 pointsminimaxir56 comments

Reminds me of this great presentation: http://lunar.lostgarden.com/Rules%20of%20Productivity.pdf

Especially this graph of productivity over time: https://slides.com/seldo/makersquare-6-stuff-everybody-knows...

TLDR: if you crunch for 4 weeks it will take you so long to recover that it'll be as if you never crunched.

Source? Also is the 4 weeks time a universal constant?

I recall an interview once where I was told that everyone on the team put in 60+ hour weeks, every week. They then said something along the lines of, "Hey, nobody has ever turned down a job with us before, just because we work too hard."

They honestly looked surprised when I offered to be the first and walked out.

I'd be the second if they told me that. Places like that, with their "live to work" culture are always shitshows.

i've worked 100 hours for a year at a time. thats not living to work. that's being a useless zombie

nothing quite stings like being woken up from sleeping underneath your desk at 8 am, not having left the office for a week and smelling like a rabid dog and being told that your level of commitment is disappointing.

I'm sorry to hear this. Was this for a company? If you can say, love to know which one so I know to never apply or recommend them. I really can only do around 5-7 hours of solid productive programming a day. Otherwise my brain gets fried and quality, innovation, and speed diminish.

I've done three bootstrapped startups (none ever raised VC capital), and while I usually work every day of the week, it is typically 4-10 hours a day.

Wow. I couldn't imagine that, especially under that stress I think I'd explode.

100 is not 60.

A lot of startups put in 60.

60 is a lot, but if you're maybe 'first 6' people and a major shareholder ... it's not unreasonable.

I think of the time someone can work steadily without problem as a normal distribution.

80% can do 40 hours.

20% can do 60 hours.

5% can do 80 hours.

1% can do 100 hours.

There are people who struggle to do 40 hours of quality work and there are people who can work all the time with very little sleep. Neither proves anything about the other.

I don't understand how people can work more than 100h a week.

I mean, there are just 168h in every week and I sleep about 70 of them. I could probably go with 60 if I wanted, but that still just leaves ~1h per day for non-work related tasks.

Maybe these people are counting their breaks and when they're sitting on the toilet thinking about a problem. If this is the case, I would get to >80h work a week too.

You sleep 10 hours a night?

On average, I think.

But this also covers the hours I'm laying in bed and try to fall asleep.

"I don't understand how people can work more than 100h a week."

It works like this: they are always working.

Basically anything they do that is not 'work' is a 'break'.

So food, gym, maybe watching a film. That's literally in their view a 'break' from working.

I know people like this - and I go into this mode myself sometimes.

Your default behaviour is to be 'working'. That's what waking hours are for.

Mind you 'reading HN' probably counts basically as 'work' in their minds, similarly reading the news.

Guess I'm one of the unlucky ones on the other side of the distribution.

I work for a place like that but everyone pretends like you can choose to work however much you like. I'd prefer if they just admitted it.

OP of the rant here:

I wrote this in response to another post about a "15-year old founder who works 130 hours a week ‘pure hustle’" and the backpatting that followed in the comments: https://www.facebook.com/groups/hackathonhackers/permalink/1...

okay that's just absurd and literally inhuman. 18 hours of sleep/eat/rejuvination is.. not possible.

best case scenario this is one of the 'runrate math' scenarios where someone worked one 18 hour day and multipled by 7.

It's also bullshit, every single time.

Honestly was having a hard time determining whether the linked article was satire or not. The picture of the kid who looks 8 years old at the end put me over the top.

What happened to childhood? I hope this ideal is isolated and not every 12 year old wishes they were a "founder".

I work for a web agency who bills my time directly to the client, but I get paid salary. I would have a very hard time working more than 40 without feeling like I'm getting ripped off (since I get paid the same amount regardless of time). I don't understand those of you putting in 60+ unless you have stake in the company.

I have a really hard time billing more than about 30/week without feeling like i'm being taken advantage of in those situations. There are all kinds of non-billable activities that you do as an agency developer that need to be accounted for; hitting 40 billable hours means I did 50+ actual hours, minimum; oftentimes more.

I went out on my own again after a couple of W2 jobs and this time resolved to calibrate everything on the assumption of working 20 hours a week, including my rate. End result: I'm not overworked (not on my client work, anyway), I don't feel stressed about making my quota, and I have more money coming in than I ever did as an agency dev. I will probably take another W2 job at some point but after burning myself out several times on my own startup, compared to how I feel about my client work (nice and rosy feeling) I feel pretty confident that I won't let myself get pushed into it from an employer again.

In my 20s I regularly did 80 hour weeks.

In my 30s it was probably 60 hour weeks, but I once did six back-to-back 100+ hour weeks to ship a feature. Took me a few months to recover from that.

When I was in my late 40s I did a three-week reprise of those back-to-back 100+ hour weeks, and again it took me months to recover. I escaped that particular group just ahead of a year+ death march that I probably would just have quit in the middle of.

Sure, you can crunch. There is a cost. I probably would have been a lot happier not working so much, but honestly I didn't know how.

It's still easy to get sucked in, but I'm both too wise and too old to do heavy crunch hours, though I will happily spend the odd few late nights getting something out the door.

Agreed. Past 35 there is quite a noticeable recovery period.

Also - I find it's not the actual work ... it's the stress and the relentless nature of it. 100 feels like watching 3 toddlers every waking moment of the day.

Founder of Cisco: https://youtu.be/mhz24AR3nIc?t=1m20s

"Sincerity begins at 100 hours per week..."

I can see dedicating the vast majority of one's time (even 100+ hours a week) to doing something you deeply care about. I would say, however, that the vast majority of people, even entrepreneurs, are not in a situation where their work satisfies that condition. I can only suppose Mr. Bosack's work did.

Nonetheless, idolizing 15 year olds who work 130 hours seriously rubs me the wrong way.

We already have 10-11 years old that are burnt out by performance related stress even without such idols, so I'd say idolizing 100hours week for 15 years old are patently insane.

The age of onset for serious stress related psychiatric issues has been dropping for quite some time, it's all very concerning.

But yes, I agree with you in principle :)

Not in a position to watch it right now, but that's probably CEO accounting where things like 'eating' and 'commuting' and 'working out' get counted in hours worked.

Makes sense, but only if it is your own company.

I find it strange that in certain tech shops, the measure of your productivity is not efficiency, but how many hours you spend physically in the office.

Doesn't this select for inefficient and incompetent employees?

No doubt. It is likely rooted in (or related to) the high school thing of grading good students apparently based on how much they sweat rather than the quality of their work.

The world at large seems to generally do a poor job of figuring out how to measure productivity in a good way that promotes the best practices.

To some extent, but the bigger factor is that it also selects for obedient employees.

Your efficiency doesn't matter to most execs if they don't control it.

I think 40+ hours weeks happen only in the US. This is one of the reasons I'd be reluctant to ever work there.

It's very hard to program effectively (effective being the keyword) more than 4-5 hours a day for most people. Sometimes you get that day/week when you're inspired and work more, but otherwise it's just pointless, maybe even detrimental, to force yourself.

http://dilbert.com/strip/1994-12-25

If you keep pushing yourself like this, you'll crash and burn, and it takes a long time to recover, trust me on this. Get your 8 hours of sleep, and remember that you are not a robot. Take care of yourself.

I'm curious to see what the definition for most here as to what those 100 hours would be. All in the office?

I work for a big corporation and do 40-45 hours a week. I'm paid well, and have great work life balance. I started at the bottom however where I was not paid well, worked 50-55 hrs and did not have any balance but endured to help support the family while my wife completed her doctorate.

My wife practices as well as teaches now. Teaching requires grading and if you add up all the hours she thinks about her students and takes their emails and waits for them to turn things in at 11:59 she easily works 50-60 hours but not 'traditional hours'. We have a great night and she comes home and guiltily brings her laptop to bed to get a little work done, etc.

Maybe I just don't have the drive to make more money than I need to live in the cheap mid-west and that's a huge driver? Live to work, work to live differences I suppose.

I come at this from the opposite side: Under what circumstances is working 100+ hours a week optimal? I can think of quite a few actually. Building/updating life critical systems come immediately to mind. Security vulnerability work, in the same vein.

Let's also not ignore that plenty of people are working 100+ hour weeks. Many Nurses/Doctors, laborers & construction workers, deployed military members, movie producers, financial brokers.

I've seen all of these first hand - hell I've done it for extended periods. Near Christmas of 2010, about a month after I got back to the Pacific from 8 months in Iraq (Those were 90-100 hour work weeks at a minimum), the Koreas got into a little fracas [1] and it looked like war time for PACOM. That first week I worked 136 hair on fire hours with 38 of those being straight through.

That's 20 hours working, 4 hours of sleep (usually on a cot in a meeting room) with meals eaten while reading message traffic and reviewing documents in the bathroom. The following months were better, but not by much.

In my experience 100+ hour weeks are usually less than 12 months and then a break. Often though, the break is short (a week or so) and it's time to start again.

So it's actually not that crazy, but you have to be committed. Most people aren't that committed, and I find that sad, as there is so much worth committing yourself to.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombardment_of_Yeonpyeong

I can only speak for myself, but I would completely self-destruct both mentally and physically working that much.

Only possible exception would be something that doesn't feel like work at all, but then it isn't really working, is it ?

It would be more like accidentally getting paid for living the life one fortunately were able to choose living.

Most people would die soon if they try to do that. I'm happy for you that you have a very capable body and a strong mind.

> Under what circumstances is working 100+ hours a week optimal? I can think of quite a few actually. Building/updating life critical systems come immediately to mind. Security vulnerability work, in the same vein.

I would say the opposite.

If someone is working on critical systems where literal life and death is at stake, I want them rested and at full mental capacity with the ability and time to think through repercussions to choices they make.

Agreed generally. I think the rub is where you get systems that are so specialized that you can't throw bodies at them. The Apollo missions are a great example of this [1].

So while it would be ideal to be able to have 3 shifts that work on the same project or codebase, to get the desired speed you need, in practice generally only a handful of people can manage the complexity.

[1] http://www.airspacemag.com/space/apollos-army-31725477/

I'm not suggesting throwing more bodies at a problem is a solution, it's often not.

Apollo is a good example of artificial deadlines pushing development effort. What would've been the impact of pushing back? A launch delay? Okay, maybe a considerable delay. No life was in jeopardy by pushing it back. It was all political (and maybe some orbital mechanics too).

Similarly for folks working on life critical systems today - sure, $Company might launch their new thingy sooner, and perhaps nobody dies as a result of shitty code getting shipped. But a week or two's delay is probably worth it.

If you're responding to an emergency - that's an entirely different situation. Maybe everything's on fire and you're losing money hand over fist or someone's life is actually in danger - sure, fine, work the stupid hours to solve the immediate problem.

There's a reason that airline pilots are forbidden to work too many hours.

Should doctors not have the same kind of rules?

I remember hearing that while medical workers work very long shifts of consecutive hours, there is still a very noticeable drop in performance--however, there was an even larger drop in care when they switched shifts. So while the long shifts are problematic, the reduction in shift switches outweighs it. I imagine the armed forces have a similar rationale--they seem to be pretty thorough about studying these types of things.

Graduate school found me working more than 100+ hours a week in measured doses. I have the 40 or so white hairs to prove it.

It's funny how much your perspective on graying changes in your early 30s: I feel like I earned those hairs (for which I also have a PhD to thank) / am just grateful to have hair at all. My 18-year old self would appalled.

I hear that!

I've noticed that the managers and companies that do this seem to be fostering cult-like behavior.

It's obviously deleterious to productivity, but where people consider themselves to be doing it of their own volition (as opposed to being threatened with termination), it does seem to breed loyalty and dedication. The non-loyal get weeded out and the half convinced convince themselves that they wouldn't be working 100 hours a week without a good reason.

Economically it only makes no sense if you assume that companies are optimizing for productivity.

In a field I used to work in we did 84hr weeks (7-12s) for a few month stretches then a little break to normal hours or time off before ramping up again. This was physical labor work however. There's no way I could work that schedule productively in a programming job. That was one of the hard things to get over when I went from skilled trades jobs to programming. It's a different kind of exhaustion you feel from working long ass hours and it's much harder for me to concentrate on code after hour 10.

As a contractor, I'm OK with companies that want me to work 100 hour weeks. If I get a 3-month contract, that year I'm only working 3 months.

The problem comes when they want to pay you like you worked 30hr.

So...? I can just refuse, can't I?

Not only can, but should.

big fan of measuring the quality of work vs time invested. ive been working on this myself. i don't necessarily plan to work less over all, but i think id like to work on other projects. if I can spend 4 hours managing, 4 hours coding, and 4 hours researching things, and I can accomplish 50 or even 60% of my my normal 12 hour single topic work load, I'm way ahead and not burning out.

I have to wonder how many of the claims of heroic work-weeks really are true. I think I have worked something close to 80-hour weeks once in my life, and it left me a complete zombie.

No politics.

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