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?
Also, hours that somebody appears to be working is definitely the wrong metric for developers.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Otherwise, much as I would like to donate my time to my employer for fun, I just can not afford it.
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 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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
(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.)
Usually, though, he has already got it done.
I've found that hours worked is a poor measure of product devotion :)
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.
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.
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...