1. Should that be 7x24 since it is followed by hour?
2. Hero worship is toxic. It like the ultra thin models used for advertising. This just perpetuates unhealthy attitudes toward work.
Edit: changed phrasing of 1
How is someone supposed to come to a conclusion that such companies are successful in spite of and not because of such environments? What a backwards way to build an organization.
People like talking about how things like this are idealistic, but what's more idealistic? Saying that you should hire the minimum amount of people to do the entire workload without taxing the finite biological constraints of the human body, or that you can't afford to do that and that somehow you will be the special person who can transcend your biological constraints without catastrophic failures?
If you ask me, the latter is what sounds idealistic. That's my criticism of this post.
Maybe you have a different definition of outsource, then. For me, outsourcing is not necessarily sending work to a cheaper worker.
>>If you hire talented folks and understand how to divide labor properly Sure, but I don't think this is about division of labour. It's about communication, the small talk, all the things you have to hold in your head and cannot communicate because there's too many of it, and it's changing constantly.
I've worked in startups where it was thought possible to bring together a random group of people and get work done, and it failed miserably. I've also worked in startups where we did not do it, and went ahead to be successful. These are subjective experiences, but after almost two decades in software, I can humbly say I can see the patterns.
>>Saying that you should hire the minimum amount of people to do the entire workload without taxing the finite biological constraints of the human body
You should hire if you can, but it may not always work out if the person is remote and the role demands a lot of face to face interaction.
I am curious though, how well did you sleep that year?
What I'm saying is that your firm survived in spite of, not because of this frankly amateurish decision.
These kinds of people have little life outside of work and few interests outside of tech.
There are those of us who seek careers in tech but do not want to go home and think about tech or even read much about it in their off-time.
My first 5 years on the job, I lived and breathed the subject matter - was kind of required since I didn’t study it in school, but to be honest, I have no memory of a social life or hobbies during that time and it kind of skipped past me like a poorly scratched CD... I just missed out on LIFE.
I now default to assuming that people with a lot of voluntary unpaid overtime have a personality disorder. Effectivity/productivity is an orthogonal axis.