Workaholics fixate on inconsequential details | Hacker News Reader

Workaholics fixate on inconsequential details

37signals.com

44 pointsnaish35 comments

37signals advice seems like it comes from a really really narrow set of experiences. Best to take with a large pinch of salt I'd say.

Sure, but anyone's advice comes from a narrow set of experiences that they try to make more applicable. Take anyone's advice with a pinch of salt.

In Paul Buchheit's words: Advice = limited life experience + overgeneralization

I agree. I was just meaning it seems 37signals life experience is especially limited.

I think what he's saying is that they haven't paid sufficient attention to how well they generalize. That's the other half of essay writing.

You don't need to cite research to establish this: it's a tautology. The word "workaholic" has several senses. The one they mean is someone who works long hours but gets little done. The only way you can do that is to work on inconsequential things.

The word "workaholic" has several senses. The one they mean is someone who works long hours but gets little done.

Can you cite a definition of "workaholic" that has this sense? I can't find one (in a few minutes of googling). The definition that seems to come up everywhere is "compulsion or addiction to work". If they're arguing from that then it's not tautological.

The closest thing I found to the sense you mention is in the second-last paragraph of the (rather good) Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workaholic. Which makes me imagine the following thread: "Ask YC: Are you a "bulimic" or "relentless" workaholic?" :)

I'm a native English speaker, and since the word is a colloquial one of comparatively recent origin, I've probably been using it for longer than it's been listed in most reference works. I know from my own experience that one of the senses (in fact, the main sense) is someone who works a lot but gets little done.

In any case, that's implied by definitions like the one you cite. Someone with a compulsion to work works a lot; otherwise you wouldn't call it a compulsion. And it's clear from the article that they're not talking about the kind of people who work a lot and achieve great things, since otherwise the message would be "Be Mediocre." So the only remaining possibility is that they're talking about people who work a lot and don't achieve much.

I basically agree with what your saying, but I think it's more about the relative amount of work they get done per hour than the absolute amount of work. I try to get 30 solid hours of work done per week in a normal office setting. However, by approaching coding like a surgery where I want to make the minimal changes to get something to work I can get a lot done. Where "workaholics" want to sling code around which seems to work really well but takes 2 or 3 times as long for the same result.

EX: One workaholic I knew spent 15 hours "cleaning up" a five line function I had written in an hour because it looked odd. Now he also produced a working result, but his version added 3 classes and changed about 20 pages of code. A few months later and he said "I would rather spend time making the code understandable than try and understand the code." Which seems stupid to me, but by burning a lot of time he ended up being fairly useful.

I usually take "workaholic" in the Japanese sense--someone whose boss assigns them 12 hours of work to do in an 8 hour day, is culturally expected to complete it all, and has this view internalized to the point where they feel bad when they can't.

That's a bad definition of workaholic. I think the similarity with alcoholic is there to indicate an addiction to work. Having a boss that makes ridiculous demands (which you must complete or get fired) doesn't make one addicted to work, it just makes it a shitty job.

The post briefly flirts with a refutable hypothesis, and then degenerates into a tautology. They start with conditionals - often, they don't contribute well, and "they may become fixated on trivial tasks. This leaves open the possibility that some workaholics are, in fact, focused on the right tasks and contributing well, (though perhaps at the expense of their own health and sanity).

The rest of the post essentially turns often into always, and may into will, and at this point, yeah, it becomes a tautology.

That said, I think PG wrote that a startup is a way of compressing a lifetime of pain into a few years. It probably isn't sustainable for a lifetime, or even a decade.

I think the article's author confuses a perfectionist with a workaholic. A perfectionist isn't by definition a workaholic and vice-versa yet the article seems to infer that your perfectionists are killing your productivity.

Look - I'm guilty as anyone of spending three hours on a 120x120 .gif to get the right font in exactly the right place but that doesn't mean that the company is worse off as a result. I do that about 1-2x a month (waste too much time on a stupid task in order to perfect it) and I chide myself on it each time but that doesn't mean I'm a perfectionist or a workaholic; it means I'm just prone to getting caught up in my work and not realizing how much time I've spent on something b/c I'm enjoying it. When I look at the clock of course I think, "That's good enough. I can't justify spending three hours to choose the font!" and I feel bad but it's a necessary process AFAIC.

I was a workaholic in my first job for about a year, bragging how late I had to stay the previous night etc until I heard a manager I respect tell another "Some slog, not knowing how to plan work".

The person I was trying to impress was thinking all along that losers stay late.

pwnt

Maybe this article and the sources it cites are correct, but how do you distinguish this from passion for the work? Some people work long hours and are extremely productive, because they feel passionate about the work.

It would be extremely dangerous to dismiss all hard workers as workaholics, especially for a small startup. Perhaps it's just me, but I get a distinct feeling that this article's author thinks long hours are a sign of wasted time.

To misquote Ambrose Bierce, a workaholic is someone you don't like who works as hard as you do.

As a former workaholic, it can be cured. Workaholism can be fueled by an intense drive to show others how hard you can work (the classic I'll show them attitude). Which is good because you can divert it to other interests (e.g. not your job). For example, I diverted my workaholism to Toastmasters and it simultaneously saved my job (was going to quit, feeling underappreciated) and I stumbled into a great group of people (many, still friends).

"The person may look like a hero, coming in to solve crisis after crisis, when in fact the crises could have been avoided. Sometimes, the workaholic may have unwittingly created the problems to provide the endless thrill of more work."

I've had a few jobs with big organizations where they expected long hours, and it would be a stretch to say that I created the problems.

I think whether or not your organization hits "crisis mode", and how often, is something that company leadership and management needs to control. They can't cry wolf all the time - it is not good for your people's morale (and sanity) to push them that hard all the time.

I used to have a boss who always said "This is you #1 priority!" Uh boss, this is the third time today you've said that. Which of these #1 priorities comes first? I think sometimes crisis mode is more of a (dysfunctional) motivational tactic than a scheduling strategy.

Most of the time in my experience, the "crisis mode" resulted from poor planning. The leadership tried to fix the situation by convincing the employees to work longer hours, which invariably made things far worse in the long run.

The reality is that very rarely did the longer hours help to get things done more quickly, instead the sweatshop mentality resulted in more bug-hunting and less progress.

I have not yet in over ten years encountered a situation where the long hours approach actually worked, though the management thought that it was working because people were working long hours churning out lots of code.

when i was in high school and college i wanted to get into game development. but stories about multi-month 'crunch times' eventually turned me away. in fact the games industry was renown for them. it was likely through a combination of poor planning and wishful hoping. it's quite sad, because not having me is about the biggest loss the videogame industry ever suffered

http://www.igda.org/qol/whitepaper.php (download requires account, but page has few stats)

That's the main reason that I also stayed out of the games industry, even though playing games is what lead me into programming during high school.

One thing that always makes me wonder about the perpetual crisis mode folks is that the vast majority of them despise Microsoft for producing such low-quality products, but follow exactly the same microserf development model that lead Microsoft to doing that.

A lot of the developers working there left as soon as their options vested, and for years MS has been paying the price in terms of maintenance overhead and a plethora of security holes and bugs in released software, which has lead to a reputation for having software that's full of security holes on top of everything else.

Joel Spolsky has also commented on the value of encouraging developers to work sane hours rather than sweatshop hours, though I don't know which of his articles it was in.

Game developers can't help it--basically, every title is a race to make the best use of the newest (to the point that anyone other than a game developer would call it "alpha") graphics technology. There's also almost never maitenance: 1.0 is final for console games, and usually final for anything else (no new features are ever added, only bug fixes.)

The only things that don't fit this model are MMOs (RPGs or FPSes) because their clients are dependably net-connected on large lines, the content is on the server under the company's control, and many people will still be "coming into" the game long after it is released, and continuing to pay money for the game, basically keeping it alive. I imagine Blizzard must think of WoW as relaxing and elegant work compared to their other titles.

Sometimes, the workaholic may have unwittingly created the problems to provide the endless thrill of more work.

This one rather sounds like a pathology. Many if not all great things were created by workaholics.

Psychologically, every workaholic has reasons for being it that are very personal, oftentimes latent, and from what I can tell unrelated to the actual performance.

So, workaholism is a necessary but not sufficient condition for being able of creating great things, but otherwise it means nothing.

This is obvious, but it doesn't really contradict good startup advice...to me, it seems as if many independent observers assume that doing a startup is synonymous with doing nothing except sleeping and working.

There are times in a startup's life when this is necessary, but even then it isn't sufficient: everyone needs to work all the time on the details that matter because there is too much work to be done and not enough time to do it.

I guess 37signals's stories are popular because the apparently pose a counterpoint to the standard Silicon Valley startup culture, but in fact they are only pointing out obvious things that most successful startup founders already live by: you can't work non-stop for two years without a lot of positive feedback on the way (and for five years maybe not at all), breaks with no work are necessary, perfectionists can get derailed if not careful, etc.

An undertone in other 37signals stories is that you can create wealth slower but with more certainty than most startups are trying to do, and that people shouldn't try so hard to create a successful startup..but I can't see that these views are mutually exclusive. To each his own. Both these kinds of companies are important to technological development.

37Signals tend to pontificate, so I think a little extra skepticism is justified. In this piece, all they're really doing is quoting an interview with someone a newspaper called an expert. Also, they subtly change the subject halfway through.

Still, if you define workaholism as addiction to work, I think it's foolish to defend it on the grounds that startups require hard work and long hours. In my observation, the "work" in "workaholic" does not mean "getting things done". It's closer to just "being at work". It's more often a zombie-like state than an efficient one.

If you are sensitive enough to your inner process to work long and hard when you're productive and step back from work when you're not, you're not a workaholic, you're a Zen master.

there actually are people who need work in a psychological sense. but abstraction and creativity aren't their fortes (they are detail-oriented are rule-ish) so most of them stay away from technology development

every company should have a blog, yeh? And most use it for advertising, but is anyone else tired with the incessant preaching (and linking to news.yc) of 37signals?

I have great respect for their business, their founders and employees, and their theories about work.

But seriously, is that article going to change the way people work or think about work? Let each man and woman decide how they'd like to apply their own resources (namely: time and money) and let 37signals worry about building products.

Great marketing, but news.yc readers are more than aware of 37signals and most have probably already made up their mind of whether or not they agree with the company's methodology.

i was annoyed at first too, but i think they are right about these things. and if they are able to disseminate them to the point where a few more companies take heed, they will have done something good

the thing to watch out for is being selective with evidence

Nah, I'm not tired of it. It's obvious 37signals want to "change the world" in some way, and if you appreciate that, subscribe. If not, don't.

What /does/ tire me is that they set up a special "product blog" separate to SvN, but then continue to crosspost almost everything to SvN on a weekly basis anyway.. why bother?

Or they're biting off more than they can chew ;)

I'm trying to manage my main software business right now, plus starting a new startup which now has a fairly firm deadline of delivering our beta release by the week of May 20th (some promotional opportunities arose that we wanted to take advantage of, now we're booked for those so it's do or die!).

I know I have workaholic tendencies, and I agree they ought to be curbed (balance produces so much more and so much faster in my experience), but right now I don't have much choice. I imagine many startups, esp. those funded by day jobs, find themselves in similar situations.

So maybe temporary or binge workoholism is worth it, as long as it's not habit forming :)

edw519's thoughts about workaholism (with apologies to the original author(s)):

To every thing there is a reason, and a time to every purpose under your project

A time to study and a time to write

A time to code and a time to pluck up that which is coded

A time to kill ideas and a time to heal that patch

A time to break down algorithms and a time to build up frameworks

A time to weep about bugs and a time to laugh about clean compiles

A time to mourn that dead end and a time to dance when it works

A time to cast away duplicates and a time to gather common functions together

A time to embrace someone else's code and a time to refrain from embracing it

A time to seek advice and a time to lose illogical prejudices

A time to keep and a time to refactor

A time to clean up variable names and a time to rewrite

A time to accept and a time to keep testing

A time to love your idea and a time to give it up

A time for plowing onward and a time to rest.

just in case some don't get it, it's a play on a Bible passage in Ecclesiastes Chapter 3.

Also in popular culture, here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNopQq5lWqQ

I'm at the airport now! Going to europe!

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