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Comment by schnitzelstoat | Hacker News Reader

I always find it funny when there are so many articles about how CEOs etc. work like 80+ hours a week.

It's very different sitting in meetings and organising the activities of other for 80+ hours a week than it is writing bug-free (or at least relatively free) production grade code.

Doing the latter for 80 hours is more likely to result in errors and mistakes that will just cost more money and time to fix than has been saved.

I suspect the engineers at his startup still only do 32 hours of actual focused work.

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The CEOs I know spend much of their time socializing /networking either through social media or on the phone. To them, having a fancy dinner with a prospective partner is classified as working. No wonder some people claim they "work" >80hours/week.

Are those CEOs in charge of companies that actually ship product?

I've seen hundreds of wantrepreneurs who call networking "work" and yet haven't shipped anything, haven't sold anything, and are just wasting everyone's time.

> Are those CEOs in charge of companies that actually ship product?

Yes, all of them.

I know them because I either worked for them or worked with their companies.

Was employee number one and prelaunch was convinced my CEO would take any meeting he could just to make work for himself so he could complain about how hard he worked.

Things got a lot better post launch when he had more actual work to do, but I think his work weeks probably consolidated to something close to 50 hours.

Don't want to be too hard on him, since he was very good at his primary role, namely pitching the company to the investors.

To be fair, I would consider spending time with people you wouldn't spend time with unless you're paid to so, as work.

Sure, you can claim it's not really work in the narrow definition of work, but if you go down that path, you will end up at "it's only really work if it's physical work".

I also don't have a problem with claims that having fancy dinners with partners constitutes work.

However, it's disingenuous to compare them with plowing a field, laying bricks, welding steel bars, driving a bus, serving meals or even fixing software bugs.

Disinegenuous in what regard?

What may seem like "eating and drinking" for sales and biz dev folks is a game requiring thinking on your feet, subtle negotiation, reading social cues, and constant strategy changes.

I think his point is that you train all your life for all of that and it's closer to normal activities. Plowing and other physical exertions or programming and other very demanding intellectual activities are waaay off from what the human body is meant to do 80 hours per week, long term.

I deeply disagree and I'd wager anyone who has done any sort of sales or biz dev does too.

Trying to influence a potential client to close a multi-million dollar software contract is anything but close to 'normal' activities. It's very demanding intellectually and emotionally.

I really encourage you to learn more about what sales folks actually do when having dinner with a big prospective client. They aren't just eating.

You are completely right. I am a Software Engineer that had to play Head of Engineering at a 100 person start-up. I had the chance to go to Money2020 in Las Vegas along with my CEO, assisting to several lunch meetings and "receptions" . As well as travelling around the USA to raise VC money.

That shit is difficult, tyring and definitely requires certain skills to do it right. I definitely would put it up there with developing complex Software architectures.

The CEO of WeWork claims to work almost 20 hours a day in this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5tSINazw78). Its impossible to do unless you are spending your time doing light work. Any intensive work that requires brain power will burn you out after 10+ hours. And to do it consistently day in and day out is impossible. I work 7 days a week averaging 10+ hours a day. I can barely hit 18 hours doing straight intensive work, and my day after suffers.

70+ hours a week is a lot. Any chance at all of carving out half a day even for sitting in a cafe and letting your mind wander?

If a potential candidate tried to tell me that they had no problem and even enjoyed working 20 hours a day, I wouldn't hire them because they are demonstrating that they are clearly incapable of basic organizational skills.

Maybe the candidate just trying to show their passion and they just not completely trusted you, so they're not sure about the answer.

Or the candidate may have just failed another interview hours ago because he said he enjoyed working 8 or 12 hours a day, and lose the faith of humanity all together.

You'll never know why they've generated that answer if you don't ask a follow up question.

> I suspect the engineers at his startup still only do 32 hours of actual focused work.

I would be surprised if they were able to do even 32 hours of actual engineer work.

My rule of thumb has always been an average of six hours a day, five days a week. You can generally get developers to write code sustainably for 30 hours a week as long as the number and length of working days are limited.

They can still be productive past that with tasks other than writing code, and you can push them past that temporarily to hit a deadline, but if you schedule in more than that on a regular basis, things will start to decline in all kinds of ways – morale, retention, quality, tech debt, documentation, etc.

Periodic meaningful time off is also essential – not just from a human perspective but also an operational point of view. It's better to discover single points of failure when you can plan for it rather than unexpectedly. There's an awful lot of organisations I've seen that don't realise what will happen when their lead dev quits / gets sick / gets hit by a bus. I've seen a few people say "vacation is chaos monkey for people" and it really is (anybody know the original source of that quote, by the way?).

Sounds like the article is here just to tell "Look guys, I work 65 hours a week and I don't complain, you should do the same"

FWIW, sitting in meetings and organizing the activities of others for 80+ hours per week is every bit as mentally demanding as writing mostly bug-free production grade code. After a normal day, your ability to focus and fully comprehend situations as they develop rapidly drops, resulting in lower quality decision making.

Heck, make that after half a day of work. Try doing two 1h back to back meetings in the morning and another two in the afternoon, every day, for weeks in a row, with you as one of the key decision makers in each and every single one of those meetings. It's fulfilling but utterly draining.

It is probably complaint bragging. "I'm so needed I'm constantly busy."

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