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Comment by psyc | Hacker News Reader

Do your worst, skeptical HN, but I swear on my life I've been maintaining more than 80 hours of ridiculously productive, focused coding time per week, for about a year. It so different when you love and believe in what you're working on. I literally can't wait to get out of bed and start working, and the entire day goes by before I notice. The thing I'm working on is a sheer joy to work on, and the conditions are ideal. I'd wager the inability to focus for N hours is related to the stress of having to force yourself to focus on something you wouldn't be focusing purely for the sake of it.

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I love and believe in what I am working on, I usually can’t wait to get out of bed and start programming, and that’s exactly why I force myself to stop after a reasonable number of hours. Because I know 80 hours a week (or 40 hours a week) of programming would not be sustainable for me. That much work would simply destroy my life outside of work and harm my productivity at work. Short-term gain, possibly, long-term loss, inevitably.

An interesting exercise is to run RescueTime for a few weeks and see what your daily average is. I'm reminded by this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=208818

I certainly believe people can be extremely productive for, say, 100h/w. For example, see Elon Musk for a straightforward counterexample to the "40h/w is peak absolute productivity on a sustained basis"-crowd. But it is useful to separate effective coding time from other productive, and not so productive, time. Empirically speaking, as evidenced by the thread and its sampling of highly motivated YC founders, few people average more than something like 4 hours of effective coding a day.

EDIT: I mean what I say in the first paragraph quite literally. Run Rescuetime for two weeks. See what it reports for Software Dev. That is close enough for effective coding time. It isn't rocket science. Self-reported numbers are almost without fail vastly overestimated, even for expert practitioners.

Well, everyone's different. I don't know what kind of gotcha is hiding in the word 'effective'. It's routine for me to spend 14 hours in a day actually writing and refactoring code, and it seems pretty wildly effective to me.

You need to be thinking of a career of 30+ years rather than a 3 year sprint.

It's cool you're spending your time producing, but don't forget you need to take care of yourself and hone your fundamentals (linear algebra, data structures, algorithms, your field).

Well... As pg mentions in one of his essays: the startup game is about getting the rewards of a 30 year career out of 4 years. If you truly believe that you are building something that matters and you are going to win, 80 hour weeks make a lot of sense.

As pg doesn't mention though, statically you won't reap "the rewards of a 30 year career out of 4 years" regardless of how hard you work and whether you "truly believe that you are building something that matters and you are going to win".

I've already had a career of 30 years :) (really, 25)

Sounds great. But how many years will that carry on for? Surely whatever you're choosing will be complete in the next month or two of 80 hour weeks?

It's been going on for a year, and will likely be done this month. So yes, there's maybe an end. Maybe. But it was extremely enjoyable, not something I'm looking forward to ending, like a crunch at an employer.

Do you have a family?

Noop!

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