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Comment by dannyr | Hacker News Reader

"There was a point when I was over in Cambridge with Nathan and the other developer, and I noticed that the developer wasn’t working on a Sunday... If your first employee doesn’t love what you do, doesn’t wake up each morning dying to work on HIS product, you have likely chosen poorly, and that’s exactly what we did."

I left a company before because I was being pressured to work at least 12 hours a day plus weekends. (I was averaging about 10 hours a day & worked about 4-6 hours on weekends).

I asked the CEO that he should motivate me. He said that I didn't need to since I was already getting paid a lot of money. I gave my two-weeks notice the next day.

It's possible that you hired the person you want for your company but you were not motivating him enough to work long hours.

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Yeah that didn't really sit well. Especially considering he mentions elsewhere someone else working for free, not to mention the journalists who worked for free, or the investors as well. I start to see why the other founder might have been really pissed when in the middle of it all this guy went on his honeymoon. Also this guy is a programmer but was too busy CEO'ing to do any of the technical stuff - especially when the idea could have been implemented by customizing wordpress.

I think there is a lot more soul searching to be done here about from the magical ability of the 'right' idea to motivate you. But I do absolutely concede my limited understanding of what went on comes from a couple of blog posts.

"It's possible that you hired the person you want for your company but you were not motivating him enough to work long hours."

I don't know what would motivate anyone to give up their personal lives and most of their free time for a company that wasn't even theirs. Motivation to me would be a large stake in the company.

Anyone not getting this for giving up their lives to a company is a fool.

Even then, in a product with very little traction you would have to really believe in what you were doing. Had that guy took equity and continued to work his ass off it would have most likely been a waste of time.

Interestingly I wonder if the extra hours were really making a difference on the technical side, it sounds like the majority of issues, bar the domain and facebook stuff, were not technical ones.

Maybe I'm just too European. But everybody deserves a day off once a week.

Developers (anyone really) that are too tired to think are useless to a company. Let people get their rest and their time spent working will be much more productive.

Isn't there a book about this? Myth of the man month or something like that?

The book title is "Mythical man-month", but it's that much about overworking. The book is more about making [in]accurate forecasts.

And about how throwing more people at a problem is not the right solution in most cases.

Death march is about overworking: http://www.amazon.com/Death-March-2nd-Edward-Yourdon/dp/0131...

It's not that you demand every working moment of your employees time, it's that you need it.

One of the things you're quickly taught is that you do everything you can to ensure the success of your startup. You need employees with the same priorities and intrinsic motivation as you have, or else you're less likely to succeed.

Every WORKING moment. Not every moment.

Big and very important difference. Hell, I'm a founder and if all I spent my time on was my startup I"d go insane, stop having good ideas and so on. It would ruin everything.

Employees aren't going to have the same motivation unless they get the same rewards. I've always thought it was absurd when execs would come in super pissed off that everyone wasn't pulling super long hours to ensure that the exec got his bonus. That's nice that you get a bonus Mr. Executive, but your workforce doesn't exist to sell its life away for your special benefit.

I agree with the parent. It is very important that everyone get some time off. I would be hesitant to work for anyone that was so overt about not valuing a proper work-life balance. My applications to multiple startups, including YC startups, have been stopped because they say things like "Make this the most important thing in your life."

My job / money will never be the most important thing in my life. Most important in my life is my family and nothing is going to supplant that. If you make like you aren't going to be OK with that, it's an instant deal-breaker and I'd be reluctant to continue talking to anyone that advocates such a bad situation.

We all like computers and we're all excited to build useful things, but give me a break; anyone who cares more about their startup than the general well-being of himself or his family, which well-being includes proper work-life balance, is severely misguided.

I just talked to a friend who told me who distraught he is that he spent almost every waking hour of the last two years working. He told me he felt like 23 and 24 were empty years filled with nothingness. Yes, he made a lot of money working so much, but it wasn't worth it. It never really is.

> Employees aren't going to have the same motivation unless they get the same rewards.

Not at all. I work relatively long hours now, in my regular job at Mozilla. You know why? Because I love it! If I'm bored, I work, because that's what I do in my spare time too.

The point is intrinsic motivation. You're talking about extrinsic motivation. The latter will never be as good as the former.

> My applications to multiple startups, including YC startups, have been stopped because they say things like "Make this the most important thing in your life."

I think if you're applying for startups, you should apply to one at a later stage. I can't think of many startups who can afford to take on early employees who aren't putting their life-and-soul into it. There's nothing wrong with you not to want to do this, of course.

Motivation is somewhat limited resource. And I believe that rested developer performs much better than tired one.

I wonder how much you get paid? I could see myself working just for fun, if I were certain that my salary will take care of me for the rest of my life. An example would be being an university professor with tenure, maybe? It would basically be advanced fuck-you money - you don't have the millions in the bank, but you have a guaranteed substantial monthly paycheck for the rest of your life. In corollary, whatever you do, you just do for fun. So you help out your company just for fun, and because you can.

Otherwise, much as I would like to donate my time to my employer for fun, I just can not afford it.

I think I've given the wrong impression here. Everyone is disagreeing, and probably rightly for how I've phrased it, so let me try again.

I'm not saying that I believe our employee was lazy because he refused to work Sundays. I feel that we hired someone who wasn't sold on the whole startup thing, and treated an early stage startup as if it were a regular job.

I recall a talk from an early Googler, who worked 100 hour weeks for the first five years. Startups need dedication, not because of some kind of culture, or because some exec says so, but because everything is constantly falling apart and it always needs work. You could surely do them differently (perhaps a low-stress startup), but that is another animal altogether.

So the point is you need someone intrinsically motivated to make the startup succeed. Anyone else is the wrong fit.

I think it's just that people show their intrinsic motivation in different ways.

I consider developing to be a creative kind of job, one where more arse-in-seat time means lower or even negative productivity. Our designer gets off with even less work than my developers. It's about keeping a fresh mind so you can churn out your best stuff. Instead of churning out a lot of mediocre stuff.

Perhaps when we're big enough to have code monkeys there will be time for people wanting to spend such insane hours working :)

> I consider developing to be a creative kind of job, one where more arse-in-seat time means lower or even negative productivity.

As much as I would like to believe this, I don't think it's true. Looking at people who do PhDs, including myself, they work 60-80 hour weeks because you can get more done in that time than working 40 hour weeks. Every startup founder ever has worked extremely long hours. Googlers and Mozillians are in the office long past 5pm.

Certainly your productivity drops on a sliding scale probably after 20 hours of work, but to suggest that 100 hours does not get more done than 40 is pure fiction.

There was a great post here a while back that said that research showed not only does total productivity start to decline if you go too far beyond 40 hour weeks on a prolonged basis but (and this is the kicker) your subjective evaluation of your productivity gets out of whack so you're less productive but you think you're more productive.

Personally I think that 40 is a little low. Especially considering you aren't working at 100% all the time. For me the sweet spot between a creative brain and enough churning-out-code is 60 to 70 productive hours a week. These include things that aren't strictly work work, but help with serendipity and ideas.

If you’re trying to get a PhD and your advisor expects you to work 60-hour weeks, then you either work 60-hour weeks or you consider a different path in life. That speaks volumes about what it takes to impress your superiors in a semi-feudal institution, but not much about productivity.

This all seems to me that you were trying to hire a machine. They will work on weekends and evenings without too much complaint, but form my experience as an employee, there are very few humans willing to work those kinds of hours and be happy about it. On an odd occasion when needs must, yes, but every day and every week will always lead to the inevitable. For most people (and maybe even more so in the UK), working at a startup is just another job, maybe not to you, but to them it will be. I also found as a PhD student those who worked longer hours never finished any quicker than those who enjoyed their time a little more - this is only my personal experience though. Maybe one of your biggest mistakes was not understanding people as well as you think you do - I dunno.

> I feel that we hired someone who wasn't sold on the whole startup thing, and treated an early stage startup as if it were a regular job.

Or maybe he realized that working long hours on the same thing with no breaks would actually bring productivity down below what a normal 40 hour week would after just a few weeks. You know, maybe he actually kept up on the science of productivity.

[citation needed]

Really? This information is over 100 years old in some cases. Here's a few links I found quickly. The first one has a lot of citations itself.

http://archives.igda.org/articles/erobinson_crunch.php

http://hbswk.hbs.edu/archive/5190.html

http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/05/the_productivity_myth.html

It seems to me that it's come up several times that in your company you chose to follow what you thought was right instead of actually researching it. I hope you can correct this before future ventures.

I apologize for my flippant remark above. People aren't getting what I'm trying to say in this thread, and my remark reflected that.

The key part here is that it's not sustainable long term. It would be silly to optimize for long-term productivity with launch looming and features unimplemented.

According to the latest research I've seen, you start dropping productivity within a couple of weeks of over work. You were in this mode for months, no?

Personally yes, same for my co-founder. However, the employee under discussion had only just started.

(and a quick reminder here that we're not discussing the employee's passion for the startup--which everyone would agree was low--not his "goodness" as a human being or as a developer.)

The most devoted guy in our firm works easily the shortest hours - but he works like stink and if the product demands it he will work a "late" to get a feature out the door.

Usually, though, he has already got it done.

I've found that hours worked is a poor measure of product devotion :)

I dont understand you are complaining that your EMPLOYEE isnt doing 100hours weeks when at the same time you, the CO-FOUNDER, were in "honeymoon for most of May" [1] ???? WTF!

[1]http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=45&aid=185999

Of all the things pointed out in the article, this is the one single thing that I could not see a reasonable defense to, and he didn't even mention this as one of the problems!

When a launch is imminent and you are a CO-FOUNDER, and you take a vacation, this is grossly irresponsible. The whole "life happens" comment he uses as a minor defense to it, well....guess what? Work is a part of life too! We juggle work, home, family, friends, hobbies, etc etc all the time, and it's up to us to be responsible on deciding which gets priority at any given time. While one aspect is more important to each of us, there will always be times when something trumps it, regardless of category. And well, a launch of your business compared to going on a honeymoon? Yes, absolutely that trumps it!

A honeymoon can be postponed. I've had many friends that postponed it an entire year! Sorry, I simply cannot find justification for this single act alone.

I am reminded of a certain Christian organization that I studied in college.

There is an idea in Protestant Christianity (going back to Jesus or to Martin Luther, depending on whom you ask :-) that you don’t actually earn a ticket to heaven by doing good deeds; rather, heaven is for those who believe in the appropriate Christian dogma, even if their actions in this world are not always perfect.

Anyway, this organization expected certain things of its members, and their theological spin was something like this: if you have the proper belief and get baptized by them, you will be saved from eternal hellfire and you will be filled with a God-given spirit to do good deeds, and among those good deeds was working your ass off for this particular organization. If you weren’t working your ass off, your peers and leaders, running that chain of logic in the opposite direction, would suspect that your baptism hadn’t really taken.

I realize that to someone in that organization, there is a significant difference between the above theology and a simple statement of “the way to get to heaven is to work your ass off for us”. However, to me on the outside, the distinction is... rather too subtle.

Paul, you mention that you weren't motivated to make the business succeed: "[O]ur motivation to make a successful company got destroyed by all of the above." But you also mention that you were working 100-hour weeks. Do you think you had sufficient motivation to work, say, 60-hour weeks?

This is roughly what WePay, another YCombinator start-up, worked and called "Khang's hours".

http://blog.wepay.com/2010/09/the-obligatory-wepay-%E2%80%9C...

I think the subject matter was the important bit. News wasn't our thing. 60 hour weeks are pretty easy if you enjoy the subject, and 80 hour weeks would even be fine. 100 hour weeks probably shouldn't ever be used long-term.

Totally agree. I started my company 4 years ago. We have been pretty successful so far (several millions in revenue and big customers). There are times that people need to work a lot but there is no way you can work 7 or even 6 days a week in a sustainable fashion, not even at the beginning. I never expected people to work on the weekends although sometimes they do. Of course, I never expected people to work more than me either. Most of them are extremely productive during normal working hours. I don't think having a life means you are not motivated.

Also, hours that somebody appears to be working is definitely the wrong metric for developers.

If your company can only succeed if people work on weekends or work for free, you don't really have a real company.

Bear in mind we had just launched and had completely failed to build everything our customers needed.

I'm aware that your startup is going much better than mine, but there are no tech startups where people don't work evenings and weekends at the start.

Free was because someone offered to work for free, and we didn't have the resources to pay her. We were going to pay her when we raised money, and we had agreed a rate. In the end, we paid her based on her estimated number of hours worked.

I should have added on there that my comment was based on my own experience with Windy Citizen where we at one point had 4 "editors" writing content for the site and managing bloggers...all unpaid. I was able to talk myself into thinking that was going to work until we had a harsh deadline (Obama's victory rally) pop up and all of sudden everyone was too busy to pitch in. That's when I realized these people really didn't work for the company in any real way and we didn't really have a company or business in any real way.

I did not intend it as a slight, but as something I learned in a painful, embarassing way. (The day after Barack Obama wins the presidency, we didn't have a single photo or story from the victory rally!)

Exactly... I also wonder about calling it "HIS product" in reference to the employee. If he is only an employee, it is not HIS product, it is the company's product (and the OP's, as a founder/owner).

In my opinion, intrinsic motivation for a project isn't something that you either have or don't have by nature. It is something that is built and nurtured by a variety of external forces (team members, education, working conditions, etc) until the act of performing a task is rewarding in and of itself.

Expecting early-stage employees to be intrinsically motivated while ignoring environmental factors that may be eroding that motivation is unrealistic.

Your first employee is almost closer to a founder than to an employee. It wasn't "HIS" product, which was precisely the problem.

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