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Comment by binalpatel | Hacker News Reader

The glorification of stress in start-ups is an interesting thing. I've always wonder if it's because it's a mental thing. If an industry glorified their employees physically harming themselves, it'd be horrific.

It took me a while to learn, but working hard doesn't equate to being stressed, and being stressed is more than likely to result in mediocre results.

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I don't think he's referring to "working hard." He's referring to how you behave in hard times, e.g. from the article:

"It’s about having compassion even when you feel you may not have the strength for it in the moment."

I don't read the article as glorifying stress, merely acknowledging it.

Edit: on closer inspection, this is an example of the uncanny power of titles to focus attention, magician-style, on only one thing. Certainly Levchin didn't write the title and the interviewer probably didn't either. We shouldn't pick the most provocative detail and then react exclusively to that.

I can almost guarantee that if the headline had singled out his fierce astronomer grandmother instead, the comments here would be about fierce astronomer grandmothers. Which come to think of it would be a lot better.

I agree with you - coming back and rereading the article, I didn't have nearly the same reaction. Originally I focused exclusively on that single segment, which my fault.

Right. This is a classical example of priming.

I think its a strange distinction from most west coast folks. I remember at school it was pretty common for people to have huge courseloads who would generally downplay their stress/effort. On the flip side, my friends from the east coast thought it was some kind of rite of passage to talk about how their heavy workloads and how hard they were working all the time. Similar for coworkers from France.

I would argue that if you're not engineering for reduced stress, you're doing it wrong. IMO - that means bursts of stress, possibly, to make sure you build things right the first time. In my experience, prologed periods of stress are a symptom of poor process, poor communication, giving in to feature creep, and other such negative patterns.

Startups have always glorified stress it is simply part of the modus operandi. Stress is part of life in general and a high-paced, uncertain and extremely competitive work environment compounds this.

I think Max's point in discerning between an all-nighter and continued and long-term stress is very smart. Everyone has and can pull an all nighter, but dealing with problems for weeks on end is a rare trait and most will break. Hence this is a quality he and most in this business should seek: can the candidate handle prolonged stress? If so, he's built for the challenge.

There is nothing impressive about someone writing code to fix a big for 24 hours straight. This doesn't move the needle forward at all.

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