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Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

Doing a startup seems to me more like playing soccer than running a marathon. Though you need to pace yourself, there are moments when you want to work super hard. So while being out of breath is not a sufficient condition for winning, it probably is a necessary one.

Likewise for startups. Sleep deprivation is not a sufficient condition for winning, but empirically it seems to be a necessary one. Not long-term, obviously, but during certain peak times. Even at YC there are times when we have to work so hard that we sleep less. On interview weekends, for example.

So the reason people who work hard (not just in startups, but in all fields) treat sleep deprivation as a badge of honor is that it's a sign that one has the necessary commitment not to cave when there are spikes of work.

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"Sleep deprivation is not a sufficient condition for winning, but empirically it seems to be a necessary one."

It doesn't seem to be a necessary one either, given the existence of counterexamples. Eg. Pierre Omidyar started E-bay while keeping his day job and adamantly refused to work more than 8 hours/day on it even after going full-time. One of the reasons he stepped back from a management position was that he didn't culturally fit in with E-bay after hiring a few work-through-the-night cowboy coders.

Not everyone in a startup has to work hard, so long as some people do. But someone had to be carrying a pager when the servers went down, or eBay wouldn't still exist.

Being on call out of hours isn't the same as working (too) hard. 40-hour week, plus being paged a few times a month to deal with 4am crises, is perfectly reasonable. So is pulling the occasional all-nighter to meet a deadline.

The article is talking about something completely different: putting yourself in a state of constant sleep-deprivation through working ridiculous hours. And the author is right: that's not half as effective as people claim.

> But someone had to be carrying a pager when the servers went down, or eBay wouldn't still exist.

Fortunately, that can be one of multiple people working in shifts so nobody has to be up for 36 hours at a time.

I don't believe the "out of breath" analogy quite holds, because being sleep deprived is not working at your brain's full potential, whereas running flat out probably is working at your lung's full potential.

A better analogy might be playing while hurt. You're clearly not at your full potential, but you are making progress.

But I'd argue that I'd rather have people on my team that aren't hurt: it is detrimental to performance in a similar way and acknowledges the commitment.

And it is also usually a bad idea.

You're misunderstanding the metaphor. Working while tired is working at your full potential measured in what you can do in n hours (which is the case you usually face in a startup), not in what you can do per hour (which rarely matters).

Actually, that's how I interpreted it, but I appreciate the clarification.

But I still disagree. Anecdotally, I've found that coding for 6 hours a days gets more features implemented and bugs fixed than coding for 14 hours a day.

The loss of mental acuity, clarity and creativity (again, this is for me, and anecdotal) is simply too high a price to pay.

Anecdotally, I've found that coding for 6 hours a days gets more features implemented and bugs fixed than coding for 14 hours a day.

Sure, in the long term. But when you have a big demo or a customer deadline coming up in 2 days, or a server crashing right now, it often pays to keep working past 6 hours.

Then the injury analogy still holds.

I hold up the Schilling's bloody sock as Exhibit A:

http://nbcsports.msnbc.com/id/6948862/

Curt Schilling probably would have had problems in subsequent years had he pitched in the playoffs in 2004 or not.

I think it's valid up to a point.

But the playing while injured metaphor has some parallels as well. Not only is this a badge of honor, but it's flatly expected of you once you get past a certain level of competition. This is generally good and right.

However, past a certain level of injury, you're hurting both yourself and the team, and you're better off taking time to heal.

My personal experience with sleep deprivation is that if I go too long and too hard, I am doing less work than if I had rested, even in absolute (and not per hour) terms. And DHH is 100% correct that as most people get tired, their solutions to problems get worse -- that's definitely true for me.

I've tried various levels of sleep over the years, from a solid 8 hours a night to so little sleep that I would literally hallucinate during the day. For me, except in short (2-3 day) bursts, at least 6-7 hours of sleep a night is most effective for my ongoing productivity. Any less than that, and I would have gotten more done net if I had slept.

Having said that, everyone is different, and if you're one of those people who can get 2 hours of sleep on an ongoing basis and still be highly productive, then cool.

I'm not so sure about this. Working long hours for a small period doesn't seem to me like it would change your progress by an order of magnitude. If you build something great, does it really matter whether it takes a few extra days?

It depends on the kind of work. I think there's a distinction between creative work and the more mundane stuff, and any role worth doing has both aspects. I think people only have a few hours of high quality creative work in them a day. But the reality is that most important work has a much larger drudgery component and working longer hours for that most definitely does scale linearly. Fixing bugs or pouring through financial data for inconsistencies is probably going to take you X number of hours no matter how many days you spread it over. In fact, you're probably going to be more efficient doing it in some marathon sessions.

I'm pretty sure I agree. Certain problems require too much headstate to solve in smaller time quanta, and that at a certain point, when I'm bleary eyed, I lose enough caution to think daring thoughts.

Part of it's just the adrenaline, too. And if you have friends goading you on, an allnighter can be pretty fun.

But taking a slightly longer term view - how is your productivity the next day? What's it average out to over a few days with a big loss of sleep?

Depends how you manage it. When I do this, I go to sleep mid-afternoon the next day, and sleep for 12+ hours. When I wake up after that (early morning), I feel absolutely fantastic.

The end result is probably only about 20-25 hours work in two days - i.e. not much more than normal working days. The advantage isn't in the total hours, it's in having the same problems rattling around in your head for a long time.

I can't give you a good answer to this, because it's the only productive rhythm I've known.

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