Shopify CEO says long hours aren't necessary for success | Hacker News Reader

Shopify CEO says long hours aren't necessary for success

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I don't believe anyone really does 80 hours. I just don't think it is possible and I don't think you can call sitting at a desk doing nothing "work".

I've done 60 hours during intense periods just fine... but it was only effective because of the nature of the work I was doing at the time. And, I usually took a break down the road to compensate. In no way was it even 50% creative work.

4 to 6 creative hours seems right, but a lot of work isn't creative. There is also the bullshit work that still has to get done, ie, loading up contacts in a CRM, building and nurturing relationships, reviewing emails, checking links, etc etc etc..

Most of my work weeks clock in around 50-60 hours regularly. It's pretty simple how this happens. It's meetings all day and then once meetings are over it's email, documents, admin paperwork, training etc...

Here's an example of just last Thursday which was busy but was at least not double booked and had some times I could stop and go to the bathroom, I also wasn't traveling this day which was good:

8-12 - US Senate Staff Delegation and budget review

12-1 - Software Requisition Review

1-2 - Infrastructure planning meeting

2-3 - Conference call with colleague in HI

3-4 - Meeting with an LP

4-5 - Talking with my Deputy and Admin

5-7 - Meeting with Army Futures

7 - Dinner

8-10 - Emails, Award review for employees, look over presentations due in Jan/Feb

Now, almost none of that work is creative because I'm not in a creative job anymore really. I am an executive with a 200 person data engineering and data science team building the future way the DoD builds and runs software.

That's how you get to these hours.

I'd also suggest that "Building and nurturing relationships" isn't "Bullshit work."

You can also get hours like that by working multiple low-level service or industrial jobs, or working a lot of overtime at a job that pays overtime. I have known people to do both, and the only thing that really limits it is the cost to your personal life and basic maintenance (relationships, health, home repair, that kind of stuff.) Men with a stay at home wife who is good at managing the home and keeping up relationships can really push it for long periods of time and come out fine in the end, but it's becoming increasingly rare for families to be able to get by with only one person working.

My parents were living this lifestyle. My dad routinely worked 100+ hour weeks, often sleeping on job sites and very often traveling for work. It kinda makes me chuckle a bit when I hear people say that 'nobody can do 80 hours!' when I spent my entire formative years watching my dad and everyone he knew doing exactly that but doing much harder labor.

It really feels to me like people who say this stuff are either very young, or have had extremely limited exposure to the world outside of their bubble.

Being at work for 100 hours is different from actually putting in 100 hours of work. I have worked with people that stayed 80 hours a week, but only really worked around 20 hours on average.

If your putting around while a 4 hour script runs, you’re there but not actually working during that time.

I understand your point, but it definitely doesn't apply to the situation I was talking about. When a steel mill or nuclear test facility has to go up by a certain date, the work doesn't stop. They just cut bigger overtime checks and keep people going until the job is done. And there isn't any 'hiding' at your desk, you're either visibly working on the job site or you're not.

That's now hot manual labor works. This is the bubble described by the parent comment. You'd be very surprised by how many continuous hours people work globally.

I have done construction work. There is a lot of standing around especially with manual labor positions. Even when there are hours of pure manual labor to do that’s relative. Nobody can work full out for 8hours so you either pace yourself or swap out and take breaks.

At the extreme edge you get long haul truckers who continuously work for as long as physically possible. But, on a second by second basis it’s not particularly demanding.

I've been with people who stayed at work 80 hours a week but really worked about 100 hours.

Some people really do work 100 hour weeks. Most people don't though.

I worked in restaurants and bars when I was younger, and pulled in 80-100 hours every week for a few years. When I got my first engineering job I did the same thing, trying (successfully) to learn and develop my career as quickly as I could. I’ve also gone through phases of working 60+ hours as a contractor, trying to save as much money as possible.

For me at least, doing that much productive work in a week was never very difficult, but it was only possible because I had no real responsibilities at home. I had friends, but barely spent any time with them, and I once went 5 years without taking a holiday. I wouldn’t do that again today, but for a young person trying to set themselves up in life, it makes perfect sense.

I did this when I was young, and I don't think it got me anywhere. I should have spent my 20s doing a lot surfing or something, anything really other than what I did. I should have got home at 5, and if that got me fired, whatever, got another job.

I get what you're saying, and I respect 20 year olds who want to live that way, but I personally disagree.

I had to work to support myself during college, so I was already used to the "grind". So I decided to keep up the high effort and accelerate my career while I was young.

You can have fun at any age. But investments pay off over time, so it made sense to invest in myself early. Now that I have a good career and don't have to prove myself, I can take things a little slower and have fun "surfing or something". Plus, now I have the money to actually fund my hobbies.

>You can have fun at any age.

Yes, but you can't have the same type of fun at any age.

Pretty much the same story for me (though I dropped out of college after 3 years, and wasn’t studying anything related to my career anyhow). I also moved out of home when I was 16, and had to work evening jobs to finish high school.

But as the above commenter points out, toil by itself is useless. I found an job which gave me the opportunity to learn, so all of my toil was ultimately improving my marketable skills. I also had to use initiative to create all of my own learning opportunities in this job. When I started in that job the pay was very low, it gradually improved over a few years, but I honestly would have been fine even if it didn’t. Because when I left that company I nearly tripled my salary, and it’s been going up steadily ever since.

That’s also not to say that any of that was necessary. None of the peers I had who were around the same age as me in the beginning worked anywhere near the same amount I did. They all have comfortable careers now, and are absolutely successful. However I can now demand much more from my employers than any of them can (salary, working conditions, perks...). I simply wanted more from my career, so I invested more into it, and got a greater return.

I've seen too many people happy about overtime... I dunno, I worked 12 hour days for weeks and it was hell. Doing something on the side, anything that makes some extra cash, seems better than straight up overtime.

You usually make more per hour working overtime than you would working at a second job. 1.5x is a typical multiplier, which is not a small raise! It's also worth pointing out that not every hourly job is equally mind-numbing.

You cut out all of the overhead: no new processes, policies, and personalities to learn; the work environment is already setup, as is billing; and there’s no chance of conflict of interest concerns.

There’s also no expectation of it continuing, which is good if you don’t want to have to deal with a side project running longer than expected. That’s bad if you’re looking for a true second job but I’ve known plenty of, say, young non-Christians who happily worked on Christmas at a healthy bonus.

Overtime is a far better deal. You don't have to commute or switch environments, just continue doing what you're doing (which may not be all that bad) and make a multiplier based on far you go overtime.

Add in holidays and other shifts and some people can double their income doing overtime which would be impossible to pull off with a second job.

Do you ever feel stressed, anxious, or trapped, with such a packed schedule? And do you ever feel regret over the value you produce due to the fact that you're stretched in so many directions?

My career - I think - is heading in the same direction (though still early) and I have a severe problem internalizing every little thing and its relative yield to the business. Thankfully I only manage 3 people at a small company, but training alone has been my biggest regret because I know there is so much potential in the team that has been untapped because we haven't invested enough into training (mostly due to my ability to generate and executing training resources and exercises).

Nope, I'm at my best in days like this. I feel immensely grateful I was given the opportunity and responsibility to lead and want other people to understand how great (in many senses of the term) that responsibility is.

The days where we deep dive infrastructure problems or try and get at organizational technical problems are my favorite, but those are even longer days.

This is all cool, and I'm happy for you for your privilege and luck.

However, I'm not sure what your anecdote has to do with what Shopify's CEO is saying. Certainly your hours are not necessary, rather you (and/or your manager) just choose to do them? Or do you think your employer would be significantly damaged if you did not?

Yeah, that kind of low intensity work I could do for longer (although I'd rather not). Try to maintain the level of concentration required for non-trivial programming for more than a few hours a day though - it doesn't really work. It's the difference between a leisurely bike ride (which you could do all day) and running five miles.

I'm asking this seriously, but how much of that was actual work done? I would be pretty surprised if you said that you actually worked for entire 4 hours between 8-12.

It’s just not comparable to IC work. In each of those meetings as an exec he probably makes 1 important decision. If he didn’t make that decision correctly it could cost his org weeks or millions of dollars. That is work, but exec work is just different.

+1 to this. It's different work - though the problem solving is the same in many ways.

Think about it like this, in many of these meetings you're look at a multivariate problem with very few reference outcomes for any given decision path and you need to come up with a solution that doesn't break the other parts of the system. Sound familiar?

Depending on what kind of decision is made, dozens or hundreds of people will have to change how they work, so the cost is high and in many cases the longer you wait to make a decision the more technical debt you have etc... so time is really a factor because people are already working.

For example we needed to come to some consensus on the RPC format we were going to use because one group used JSON, another Protobuf, another XML and other organizations wanted us to use older complex formats like USMTF and UCI to be interoperable. So do we create anticorruption layers and let everyone just do whatever they want? how do we prioritize our streaming consumers and producers? Should we switch everyone to Avro? Etc... you get the idea.

Right, I completely agree, but him saying that he worked for entitreity of those 4 hours is a bit misleading imo. We all know how "efficient" these meetings are.

I don't think it's fair to suggest he was slacking or something, unless you can show that the norm is to accomplish same job far faster.

Perhaps it would be fair to say, it is easier/more natural to spend 12 hours in a day dealing with people that moving bags of coal or solving differential equations.

Those hour meetings act as a crutch that drain or energize us and falsely trick us into thinking we've done something productive.

Those 12 hours could have been spent differently to acheive the same or better results if optimized time management matters but I don't believe they do matter in this case. This person is fueled by the meeting (he leaves the meeting stronger) and by shortening his day he would never fully be in a zone.

One of the tricks to good leadership in my opinion, is running interference with my leadership or leadership from other parts of the organization, when they try and create new projects or otherwise divert resources to something that isn't a priority. It's a big part of my job to take these meetings so that the core teams delivering value don't get tasked or bogged down with them.

Meetings aren't going away, and in most cases these are requirements coming from outside of me or my team. Part of the trick of leadership is deciding what you can say a hard no to and not even engaging, what you need to do a soft no to by taking meetings (sometimes useless) in order to maintain good relationships, and then for things that are important but would cause new work, to do a lot of work at the leadership level ahead of new tasks impacting teams so that you can help them maintain their velocity.

Sounds like the exec needs less to be in those meetings and more to be aware of the agenda and high level action items from the meeting.

Or more likely to better clarify the expected outcomes with the localized manager or director and get the impactful/abbreviated action items every "Sprint".

No offence, but I’ve done extremely creative and demanding intellectual work, and then work like you’ve listed.

What you’re doing is valuable and useful work, but it is a lot easier to do. Much less mentally demanding.

This is generally the wrong attitude in my opinion. I've done both very technical/creative demanding work and the organizational work as I describe.

What you realize after a while is that they are both hard, but in different ways because it's different work.

The question IMO is not whether it's easier or harder, but whether it's more or less sustainable. That in itself is two questions:

(1) Is it sustainable in the sense that you can remain productive throughout one day?

(2) Is is sustainable in the sense that you can keep doing it day after day?

I would say the answer to (1) is generally yes. Meetings usually require continuous partial attention rather than intense focus, involve multiple people, and often have built-in breaks. All of those help to prevent the problem of an exhausted lone programmer getting stuck in the weeds for hours before they realize - usually as soon as they take a break - that they've been looking in entirely the wrong direction.

The answer to (2) depends more on the person. For a true introvert, meetings all day will be incredibly draining, and even a conference lasting a few days can be intolerable without careful energy management. For an extrovert, such a schedule can be energizing and almost infinitely sustainable.

The key here is that for certain combinations of people and tasks a schedule like that is sustainable. However, that doesn't mean it's reasonable to expect programmers can do their job at that pace sustainably. Productivity will drop and/or they'll burn out. What irks me about these conversations is that people with personalities or situations that are amenable to one kind of work schedule are looking down their noses at people with completely different personalities or situations that make it a poor fit. I don't mean that as a criticism of you specifically, but others taking the same position or making the same points have displayed an appalling lack of empathy.

I think you more or less answered your own question here - people succeed at jobs that they can sustain and I concur with that. Shitty leaders who look down on different people for their jobs are just that - shitty leaders.

One caveat I'd add is that I'm an introvert myself and initially found a lot of these meetings and especially conferences, extremely draining.

However I also realized that there were ways to make them not-as-draining. For example, don't go to a conference unless you are a speaker. That reduces the feeling that you need to approach people to make conversation, make small talk etc...

For meetings, set the expectations that there will be concrete and measurable tasks that come out of the meeting, or otherwise don't have them. Just the facts ma'am. It's surprisingly effective, and way more efficient when you cut out the BS.

Things like that I've found reduce the amount of heavy social reading, politics, etc... which are so draining to most introverts like us.

YMMV

Yep sorry, I misspoke, I meant more non-creative but vital work. I just spent a day doing nothing by CRM work and data entry and used a colorful pejorative :)

I think that is how you get to 60 hours, I don't think that is how you get to 80 hours like I said.

This is a typical executive schedule. If you’re managing a global workforce, you can generally take 2am to 6am quiet hours but that’s about it. It’s not everyday but at minimum you’d usually see check-ins from Europe needing response coming in around midnight to 2am pretty much every day.

Yup, we've got people worldwide.

I keep seeing this but why do non-creatives count dinner, commuting and exercise as work? (You don't do all these but you put dinner there)

As a creative I find it hard to justify that, sure I did talk about work during lunch with a coworker or an ex coworker or friend but damn I was just enjoying my pork chops, that's not work!!!

Why do we culturally accept the distinction 'creatives' and 'non-creatives'. It's gross.

People like putting themselves in boxes, and the one he used is generally accepted classification. I don't think it's something to be offended about.

I think Tech community is quite elitist at times

No domain has a monopoly on original thought, so calling some of them 'creative' is just lazy and imprecise.

I'm just pissing into the wind. Ultimately it doesn't really matter and I agree it's not worth getting offended about.

Some people get paid to have original thoughts while others get paid to not have original thoughts. To me that seems like a pretty clear line. It isn't about whether the people can be creative or not, but whether they are expected to be creative at work.

Why do we "culturally accept" any distinction?

Also, the idea of "culturally not accepting" something seems gross. It's the antithesis of diversity.

I've been classified as a creative my entire professional life and I absolutely consider a work dinner to be... well... work. When I'm doing something on the company's behalf, of course it's work. There's no need to be so hostile on hn.

It wasn't explicitely stated that dinner was a work dinner> I personally read it and assumed he went home ate dinner and continued working

I don't count dinner as work, that was just my whole schedule.

Do you feel as a society that we should condone working beyond dinner like like?

As I read your schedule, I think, “if this couldn’t be handled between 9-5, with a no-work break for lunch, then something is wrong here and effective decisions aren’t being made.”

I say this as someone with a similar job, the machine learning manager with several teams reporting to me, budgets in the tens of millions per year, staffing decisions, executive meetings, procurement, etc. in a large global ecommerce company, with a similar large scale mission about data driven decision making.

If myself or any of the managers or teams reporting in to me has to work past dinner or _ever_ has to work (even just looking at Slack) on weekends, that’s a massive, critical failure on my part.

Unless we make it a critical company mission level priority, this type of healthy work/life balance culture won’t happen. It has to come down from leaders through example first, especially simply stopping work after about 8 hours that fit in with the diversity of personal life needs reflected by the overall staff (not just preferences of people who don’t mind working late or have fewer obligations preventing it).

I actually think one of the most critical signs of an effective leader is _not_ working, electing to let certain work take longer than it otherwise could — and defending that decision to executives — as part of maturity in establishing a healthy culture.

Working more hours is like taking the lazy way out in some regards. It’s much harder work to build healthy patterns over time. It’s kind of similar to developing the senior engineering skill / discipline to avoid unnecessary refactoring and avoid cluttering up a set of changes with superfluous extra fixes. It takes more discipline to hold back and do it the right way.

In fact there's plenty of saying no and choosing what to let sit idle happening in my portfolio, so I concur that's just part of being a mature manager. In fact I could point to at least two places in my organization that are somewhat "idle" at the moment where I could actually put additional attention. However creating that bandwidth would break other things.

FWIW, I'm the only one on my team working these kind of hours because we're still establishing our whole organization and my roles are sundry. I also recognize it as an outlier position, so I don't expect anyone to work anything more than the 40 hour week they are being paid for.

I guess rather than talking though specifics though, it's better to ask - when is it reasonable to expect a work schedule like I describe to exist and for how long?

There's no single answer to this, but it's probably a solution to the inputs of product/business maturity, funding and number of personnel with the right skills. If any of those three are "out of balance" people will need to be putting in more work than their pay and job descriptions provide for.

I'm sure being an engineering manager at a FAANG is probably pretty reasonable from a lifestyle perspective.

As a leader do you feel you are setting an unhealthy example? Your actions are being noticed and replicated.

No for two reasons:

1. I make my work/life balance expectations for the team explicit and actively discourage engineers and product/project managers putting in more than 40 hours. More specifically, the goal dates we set for increment deliveries assume they will not be working over those hours. If there are surges needed, I will do my best to add capacity to the teams well ahead of time and have some "floating" engineers who don't need a lot of spin up time to help with that delivery.

2. The majority of the team, aside from my deputy and some leads, don't see a lot of the work I do because it's not relevant to their teams/portfolios. I have a good staff and have built good processes, that makes sure that core teams are shielded from other parts of the organization, or even me from levying requirements that would push them beyond their work schedules.

Can you please take my VP’s job?

I manage a team of 10 data analysts. My life has turned into a hell of meetings 8-5, with any gaps dedicated to 1-1s or meeting with my team. Then I do email and some of my own coding on weekends. 60 - 75 hrs per week is normal now.

Complained to my execs about it and they just gave me a retention bonus but no help.

I love my job but am going to have to quit because of this.

Dinner is often literally work when you are meeting with clients, partners, employees, etc.

I have strong feelings on this and am almost afraid to post because of, I suppose, the stigma of being a hard worker. But this is what I’ve seen & experienced:

1. Hours worked & productivity are interrelated variables but they do not equal each other. So you have to explore the other variables involved in your productivity equation if you want to control effects on productivity.

2. The brain works on solving big problems even when you’re not actively focused on it. Anyone who experiences the effect of coming back to a problem they were beating their heads on for a while and quickly figured out a path forward has experienced this first hand.

3. If you’ve bought into this, then also consider that your output is solved problems. That’s what other people will see about your work. If the outcome is that you stayed at the office for 12 hours solving a problem, versus at work for 6 hours, said f this, went home, came back the next morning and worked the problem out in an hour, then what was the difference?

You kinda keyed in that a lot of work is not creative, so I think that kinda fits into this framework too. I find that doing rote work is a nice warm up or wind down block of time. So having scheduling awareness can help boost your productivity. But yeah for all of that, I’ve never been able to buy into the idea that 60/80 hour work weeks are at all a necessary idea, or a very proper one either. And this is how I’ve tried to make myself feel better that I could never personally do that kind of time, lol.

The fact is that the nature of work changes at the c level. You are no longer doing any actual work yourself. You don’t prepare specifications, do analysis or any other for of work that you might recognize from before. You won’t touch any Microsoft products yourself. Your team does this. You are responsible for hiring people to build that team for you, so even people management is delegated to a large extent.

Most of your work is being present, either in meetings or work functions. These will include breakfast lunch and dinner, and something all three on the same day.

Your main focus is communication. This work extends to working within your own departments, the company, the rest of senior management, government, share holders, banks etc.

Most of your hours are not effective. You write them off. It’s understanding that you only have 10 hours a week of effective hours out of 80 hours and making sure those hours are actually effective.Effective time will be 5 minutes in an hour most likely.

That said some people are really good at juggling all of this bs, and some people are really terrible.

We can talk about different approaches and what works and what doesn’t, but it doesn’t change the fact that the 80 to 100 hour work week is real for a lot of people in that position.

I think it's possible but probably not sustainable. Nick Winters did a 120-hour programming/game-dev workweek and filmed it so you could see if he was cheating: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0qlr22cF14

HN discussion at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6760685

I'm also open to the possibility that might be a very small percentage of people who could do it and that I might just not be one of them.

I'm also open to the possibility that I've been conditioned to expect 40 hour work weeks and that's why I may not be able to do much more. Apparently it's common for students in China to attend school for 12 hours a day. Perhaps if I'd been raised in a similar environment it would be easier to focus for longer?

It does happen, but generally in environments that are different from the 'normal' workplace - environments that contain a sense of community, where breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and sometimes evenings and sleeping are part of the job: grad school, hospitals, fieldwork, law/consulting/IB firms, etc. It seems like the mid-decade tech ideal was to import that kind of workplace style.

And you're right, that those hours are not all 'at the desk working', but they are still most definitely working hours when you're waiting for a page, an email, or a piece of data that require immediate response at 3am.

That kind of work can be deeply rewarding (in retrospect), but is very clearly damaging if it persists for too long.

I can say I've done a few 72 - 96 hour stretches of near total wakefulness (power naps of 20-40 minutes as possible, food and caffeine available nearly any time) but there's definitely a feeling of disconnect, being separate from the senses and just floating inside my own head toward the end of those.

We're talking full up tactical exercises in the military, and a couple of critical repair scenarios here and there since.

A couple of days of near total downtime is a minimum to reset from that kind of effort, and 'normal' work for at least a week or two if possible.

I think some of the people who are making claims of really long hours are using amphetamines or other performance enhancing drugs.

I'm diagnosed with ADD and have a prescription for Ritalin/Concerta. I'm a full time programmer, and I think my sustainable "real work and focus" time is max 6 hours. Today looks more like 4.

A higher dose does not increase that time, at least for me. I'm curious how those without add/adhd are affected.

I've heard from many people that if you're legitimately on the drug the experience is totally different than if you're taking it without a brain chemistry that needs it i.e. as a study drug. I wonder if that means that people who have ADHD could possibly have different or fewer side-effects than people without, if the two groups respond so differently. Are there any large scale studies about the long term health implications of using Adderall or Vivance without having ADHD?

I’m on Adderall for ~12 years but I disagree. Although I agree with the previous commenter, I don’t think it extends my “normal” productive max. Sure, occasionally I can feel productive for an extended stretch, but usually I feel wiped out after 4-6 hours of any real effort. I just had an hour long phone call and that alone was tiring..

Any of that data is going to be mixed in with any studies on people who were (presumably) correctly diagnosed with attention disorders, because in the US, the "medication" is prescribed at triple the rate of the prevalence of the disorders: 15% vs 5%.

Source:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/big-pharma-s-manu...

Additionally: being someone who was misdiagnosed, and made to feel sick for 8 years resulting in very poor appetite, increased anxiety and intrusive thoughts, and stunted physical and social growth.

I think there is something definitely to this. As a basic example, I can still fall asleep without too much trouble even after taking my Ritalin/Concerta (And I'm above the typical starting dose as well).

Doctors will also tell you this: if you feel ADHD drugs then you’re not ADHD.

Fighter pilots are given modafinil for alertness. Granted its probably a different type of work.

I can only speak for myself, but I don't even consume much caffeine anymore and still maintain 80+ hours. Between managing people, building products, meeting with clients, documentation, and more I always have something I can do that doesn't require my maximum performance at the moment.

In fact, I'd go as far as to say my personal lifestyle and habits (eating healthy, maintaining daily exercise, blah blah) are massive contributors to my having sustained this consistent output since 2012.

In my 20s I worked 80-90 hours for ... 4-6 months. It was day job, then side hustle software that I was very excited about. Now in my late 30s with kids, yeesh. Honestly it's impossible to get 40 hours in some weeks.

Edit: no drug use

Is it impossible even with effort or you no longer feel the effort is required and/or necessary?

Some months, with effort, domestic responsibility and my personal health make it impossible. But my whole family has been sick a lot this fall.

Edit: I still feel tremendous pressure to work more/longer.

Or loads of caffeine to the point it is questionable?

I would argue one cup of coffee a day every single day is questionable. We shouldn't be drugging ourselves just to reach some arbitrary deadlines

I think caffeine is often used for motivation during mundane tasks. Imagine working on a tedious engineering assignment like writing unit tests for a CRUD app. Over a few years it becomes a necessary lever, and at that point it is pretty close to an addiction.

Amount of caffeine consumed by a team may be an interesting proxy for how motivated employees are at a company (a small amount indicates high motivation, a medium amount indicates low motivation, and a high amount indicates either a severe lack of motivation or a high level of motivation).

How about LSD, Mushrooms, Ayahuasca, MDMA? Should we be using those to expand perceptions?

You’re getting downvoted but I strongly believe coffee is a huge net negative on productivity especially in the long run.

It has two scary effects: one is it seems to sacrifice some creativity for some raw output (along with a sort of scattered and less human feel to communication).

Two is that it degrades sleep quality. Which probably means a lack of memory formation at the margin over long time periods.

These are just hunches but people on caffeine just have an attitude that’s a little off putting once you notice it. I’d love to see some big studies that focus on the long term and subtler psych effects.

Hmm, I like coffee very much but I don't really use it to get shit done as much as to open my mind to creative thinking. Perhaps I'm using it differently than most people do?

Without coffee, I will feel sluggish and sleepy all morning. With coffee, I feel alert and inquisitive. I have a rule against drinking coffee after noon, so it doesn't affect my sleep patterns.

Discovering coffee in college was really what allowed me to read things for long hours. I like the fact that it activates inquisitiveness a lot more than that it enables productivity. This is a purely subjective experience, I admit.

The reason you feel sluggish and sleepy is because of coffee (your addiction to it), along with perhaps a variety of other imbalances in your diet, sleep or exercise.

For most of my adult life I drank coffee, with occasional breaks. When I quit a couple years ago I had what felt like burnout for nearly two months. It took up to 6 months after until I really felt fine within a few minutes of waking up. And now my sleep is far easier and better.

Caffeine has a 12 hour half life. That’s incredibly long. Your body is absolutely addicted to it after just a few weeks.

Everyone is different. I am more sensitive to caffeine than most. But it’s absolutely not the case that you need coffee to have energy in the morning. Coffee is a bandaid that temporarily fixes a problem by causing imbalance elsewhere.

Decaf is wonderful though! All the pleasant taste and routine.

Also I find it funny I’m being downvoted given I’m not making scientific claims but rather hypothesis and anecdote. Too many caffeine addicts that don’t want it to be true!

Final note. Focus is easy to come by if you have two things: a good environment (quiet, natural) and an interesting problem. I think the reason why everyone is addicted to coffee in tech is similar to why hard laborers get addicted to painkillers: it gets you through the shitty parts of your job. It’s why college kids get addicted to coffee and adderall as well. You’re being forced to do something that’s far outside your interest, and often in a bad environment. Well that, and it’s fun to do a drug that has a “come up” like caffeine.

Final final note: caffeine has a very specific effect on your thinking. It’s not a debatable point it’s just true. Look at the spider web experiment. It’s makes you excited certainly, it gives you a rush, but it’s almost like a mania much like other stimulants. The weird thing is it almost doesn’t hurt so much in business because so many people do it, so your clients are often also on the same drug as you.

A lot of surgeons have 80 hour workweeks. This is especially common is smaller hospitals in rural areas. It's not all surgery, but they're definitely not sitting at their desks and doing nothing. Before regulations, it was not uncommon for some doctors to work over 100 hours because they were in such high demand.

although it should be noted that the performance problems with long work hours among physicians are known and drastic. As is the rate of drug abuse among physicians. So in a literal sense, you can do it, but physicians do it at the expense of their own health and their patients (not to their fault of course, the system is just screwed up).

This doesn't exactly address the point.

Human beings are only capable of sustained attention for limited periods of time, plus they have biological needs and must navigate a physical world.

Now, if you're just talking about time on the clock, then sure- 168 hours is the limit per week. But we're talking about people doing productive, mentally demanding work. 80 hours might not be possible.

Medical residents routinely do close to 80 hours, and I would argue on average a small single digit number of those hours are unproductive. My SO is an OB resident and worked over 90 hours last week, and probably 75 of that was either in surgery, reading, studying, or giving a presentation of one form or another. About half of her weeks are above the 80 hour limit.

It's definitely possible. Just because we don't want to do it (I don't either!) or that it has negative long-term consequences doesn't mean it's not possible.

Hmm and it's no wonder that the 3rd leading cause of death is hospital error... hmm...

Which hospital is that violating the legal limits on hours per week?

Every single one of them.

I'm aware of the legal limit and every single resident I've met has broken it at least once (really at least a couple times every quarter). The "good" programs will at least not require their residents to lie about it.

How much of that was hands-on and being on-call? Being on-premises or on-call within X minutes but allowed to do whatever including sleeping... Not exactly a match to creative work.

The extent of my knowledge is shadowing an an anesthesiologist back in my pre-med days, so take whatever I say with a grain of salt.

It is real hands-on-work. There simply aren't enough doctors who are willing to work in a small town, even though they would get paid a lot more. From what I understand, anesthesiology (and surgery) is mostly autopilot work, so there isn't that much creativity, but it still requires thinking. Usually people respond to drugs the way you expect them to, but you need to be able to handle situations where things go catastrophically wrong.

There's a few minutes of careful work and then more minutes packing up and commuting, and then repeat.

For how much of that time are they actually performing the specialized work or at least decision making that only they can do?

This sounds like moving the goalposts for the definition of work.

This schedule was established by a literal drug addict (cocaine and morphine) named William Halsted, not due to high demand.

And it’s since been reviewed and maintained due to the continual finding that continuity of care is so important to health outcomes that it makes up for exhaustion.

I think the continuity of care thing is overblown. There will always be a handoff because no one can work 24/7. One way specialties such as Emergency Medicine and Critical Care (which manage the Intensive Care Units) manage this is with overlapping shifts, where for the last hour of one shift and the first hour of the next shift overlap.

Emergency Medicine and Critical Care manage to do handoffs well, as well as nursing. I strongly disbelieve that surgeons are uniquely incapable of doing handoffs.

Handoffs need to be practiced to be done well. It's lazy to avoid them, but here we are.

Ive done it. It was a startup, but not explicitly a tech company. We legitimately got to work at 7:30 every day and left at 9:00 7 days a week for several weeks.

Obviously unsustainable, but easily one of the most enjoyable periods of my work life. Everybody was helping doing everybody else’s job. It was really fun.

> I don't believe anyone really does 80 hours. I just don't think it is possible

That's a weird thing to believe. I saw it all the time when I worked in finance (but I was capped at 60 hrs, which I did routinely), and it seems pretty par-for-the-course for my friends who are doctors and lawyers.

I don't think it's healthy, but it's certainly done.

I’m confused. You say you don’t believe anyone does 80 hours and then you seem to add a qualifier to define work as that which is creative or meaningful.

To your first statement, it is possible and very common in law and investment banking, so it’s easy to dispel that misconception for you. I worked in investment banking for years and there were dozens of people on my floor which was one of dozens of floors pulling 70-90 hour weeks routinely. There is some % of an 80 hour week lost in transition (sitting at a desk waiting for feedback on a book that needs to go to printing by 4am for the 8am meeting) but you have no choice but to be there and at any moment you have to be prepared to act on whatever next step is required.

To your second point: was this work deeply creative or meaningful? To me it was. Perhaps less creative than technical. As for meaning, that depends. We would routinely work on projects that had 9-figure dollar impact on companies with tens of thousands of employees. Our numbers determined the fates of thousands of employees and hundreds of thousands in their supply chains. Today I manage over 50 people, while I have a more direct human impact now than I did then, my impact today is a fraction of what it was when our teams changed the course of companies from a little Excel spreadsheet.

If you find something you love doing and can do it in the way you want, 80 hours isn't bad at all if you're otherwise unencumbered.

I did a 7 month stretch where I was working from home, on my own schedule, doing what I loved, and was doing 15-18 hour days 6 days a week (~90-100/week), while still managing to have/cook dinner and a bit of downtime with my now-wife each day, plus a full day off. It was fantastic.

Once the product was live the work shifted just so slightly from pure create/build to maintenance/improvements, going into the office a couple of days a week, and suddenly even 60 hours felt like a lot, and eventually it was just a job and I was doing 40-45.

I think it's more a matter of finding the right thing and schedule for you rather than imposing some kind of convention onto it.

I did a few years of 80 hours, but that was as a medical resident / fellow. There is a lot of creativity in medicine (especially thinking adversarially to try to reduce premature closure on a diagnosis), but even then certainly we’re not being creative for all 80 hours a week.

Agree with this. Also in medicine we can work 12hr or 24hr shifts which imo helps "stack" together more hours so it's easier to hit larger work weeks.

As an EMT some of our crew worked 1 48hr shift and then later in the week 1 24hr shift. They got paid so little ($9.25 an hour back then!) that was the only way to survive in the Bay Area was to stack your shifts and then hit time and a half after 40hrs and double time for the last 20 hrs.

I had a preceptor who worked those shifts and I had to work her schedule while she was evaluating me. It was horrific. The 48s were brutal and I was wrecked later in the week when it came time to do the 24. Those months went by in a blur and it was basically hell to get through it.

When I advanced and got to set my own schedule I just worked 1 24hr and 1 12hr and life was great. Got to do chores and errands and long hiking trips on my days off, had enough time to travel and enjoy my hobbies.

Left EMS to more of an office job because I needed to make more $$, but I miss the patients, the camaraderie, and being out in the field.

I work in IT Security. I do 2-4 pentests a week. I shouldn’t, but I work for a small firm and don’t have much control. I easily do 80 hours a week. If I don’t we don’t get enough done, we bleed clients, and I worry about clients getting hacked. I should not work 80 hour weeks, I do not think it should be possible, but I definitely work 80 hour weeks and I am not wasting time. I do web app pentests, network and infrastructure pentests, and emergency response when they need help, and that is easily an 80 hour week. Maybe 5-10 hours of that is meetings. The rest is legitimate work.

Sometimes the hard part of the job isn't the number of hours per week at a desk but the need to always be on call to deal with problems. For me, being on call leads my brain into thinking about potential problems ahead of time, so there's a low level of work-related background noise going on all the time anyway.

I worked pipeline. We'd do 11 hour days, 3 weeks on, 3 days off. Not quite 80 hours, but we worked the entire time.

I can tell you that I worked 80 hours a week for several months and while it is not effective, it was "necessary" for the business to survive. I had 4-6 hours per day that were really effective (if even), the others were just there to get simple stuff done, which was necessary to meet deadlines.

Would I do it again? Absolutely not, because it is simply bad management. But I can imagine how easy it is to get stuck in such a work environment. Or people might think "when it is working once, it will work all the time". The truth is that if the deadlines and work would have been planned better it would easily be achievable in 40 hours.

The problem is that some startups are super chaotic, overpromise, underdeliver without even thinking about how long something takes.

It’s definitely possible to work 80 hrs of real work per week. I’ve done it myself. Your mistake is probably underestimating how diverse people’s values are. If you have a strong enough reason why, working non stop is fulfilling (especially when it becomes habit).

> underestimating how diverse people’s values are

While we're valuing diversity, let's consider diversity of circumstance as well as attitudes. Working 80 hours a week is not the same for someone who's single and healthy vs. someone who is themselves disabled or who has family members who require significant care. Assuming or implying that it's only about values is exactly what makes this discussion so contentious. Many people have the "right" values but their work role or their non-work situation is not as conducive to long hours. Or maybe they've just read the actual research instead of relying on anecdata - especially cherry-picked (or outright fabricated) stories from CEOs and VCs who benefit more from others' overwork than those people do themselves. For most people, 80 hours per week is just not healthy or sustainable.

I just took a single 29-hour workday, right before a major deadline. And coming up to that, didn't have a single off day whole December, typically working from 2pm to 4am. So yeah, it's definitely possible, but really not good for anyone in the long run.

Totally agree with this. To give an example, in the months ahead of launching .app (which I was the tech lead of), I was pulling some 50-60 hour work-weeks vs a typical 40. That was exhausting and definitely the maximum I was capable of pulling (talking about actual hours of work here, not just hours spent in the office). Plus, post-launch, I took things easy for a couple months to recover.

Agreed. I can do more than 40 hours of intense focused work not more than once a quarter.

My experience is ~4 of productive creative work per day. I can go to 6-8, but that gets drawn out to a 12-14h workday. 4h is where Im happiest and most productive. I dont force it.

I don't believe anyone really does 60 hours. I just don't think it is possible and I don't think you can call sitting at a desk doing nothing "work".

I’ve literally worked for 85-95 hours over the last 15 days with no days off except Christmas Day at 12-14 hours per day.

A few thoughts to add to the discussion, loosely related:

1) If I know exactly where to spend my time for the best rate of return, its likely that I'll have to spend relatively few hours achieving success.

2) For most people, the success they can achieve through just having a plain old job can be had for a mere 40 hours. Anything they want above what 40 hours can grant them should probably be done elsewhere (second job, side-hustle, etc) since the ROI will be very low for spending those additional hours at work.

3) The 80 hour week lifestyle is probably necessary for people who are still frantically doing what Felix Dennis calls "The Search", trying to build a company without the foggiest notion what people want.

Study after study has shown that working 80 hours dramatically reduces your productivity during those hours.

I loved what Tobi said in this tweet: https://twitter.com/simonw/status/1210622908143415297

"For creative work, you can't cheat. My believe is that there are 5 creative hours in everyone's day. All I ask of people at Shopify is that 4 of those are channeled into the company."

5 creative hours in a day absolutely matches my experience based on my own career. I can get a HUGE amount done in those 5 hours if I apply them sensibly.

Work isn't always creative though is it? It's often more menial: meetings, learning new APIs, stepping through existing code, trial and error, mentoring, etc.

For these your ROI per hour goes down, but your total ROI still goes up even after 5 or even 8 hours. Maybe not for everyone everyday, but for some people some days for sure.

That's why I still believe in 8 hour working days. Three hours for meetings, reading up on things etc - five hours for the hard creative stuff.

Wrong Twitter link posted. That’s about Apple and RSS

Bah, thanks - missed the edit window. Tweet was meant to be https://twitter.com/tobi/status/1210242188870930433

Oops, Twitter link should have been https://twitter.com/tobi/status/1210242188870930433

My experience/conclusions are similar to the comment above.

I feel like the hardest skill in jobs like programming, design (or any creative jobs, to be fair) is managing your cognitive resources, understanding when to approach problems requiring particular modes of thinking and when to stop, work on something else, or learn to do nothing.

In my mid 20s I did my share of reckless 80-100h weeks—ending up with depression and health issues that took years to recover. Some days are still challenging. And, I’m just 31.

If he's asking for 4 hours of work, then why ask for a 40 hour work week and not a 20 hour one?

40 hours (9-6) is rough enough!

No. He is not asking for 4 hours of work. He is asking for laser-focused, 100% productive 4 hours work. You can do additional work in the rest of the hours left that not necessarily is going to require that level of focus.

Correct (?) link (it's quite high up in TFA):

https://twitter.com/tobi/status/1210242188870930433?s=20

> My believe is that there are 5 creative hours in everyone's day. All I ask of people at Shopify is that 4 of those are channeled into the company.

> Now true - some people, myself included, need a few hours to wind up and wind down for those to occur. Right now I'm procrastinating on twitter instead of writing my summit talk for instance. Reddit and HN are my siren calls.

> That's fine. We are not moist robots. We are people and people are awesome. What's even better than people are teams. Friends, that go on journeys doing difficult things.

While I'm sure they want people to do some non-creactive work - it sounds like in principle they'd be fine with 20 hours of focused creative work. Maybe a 6 hour day, to put in 4 hours of work?

I think some of it has to be taken as more of an adage than pragmatically. Firsly, the four hours may not be continuous so having random hours doesn't really work. Additionally, it's caveated with creative work, regardless of job title, a lot of work would involve non-creative aspects which need to be done.

Because there's meetings, email, IMs, documentation, waiting, etc. The rough breakdown is 20 hours of focused creative work and 20 hours of everything else per week.

I think he's assuming that people are going to spend some fraction of their time at work advancing their careers and maintaining their relationships with coworkers (and that he does not include that time as "creative work").

You cannot work at 100% in 4 uninterrupted hours. You need to take some breaks in between, and also do some mundane things.

He’s asking for 4 hours of creative work, with the assumption being that the balance won’t be creative.

I agree and regarding 3) would you put most startup founders into this bucket? In reading Peter Thiel Zero to One I was struck by his point that real power law focus in a startup means you're doing something new, thus "The Search" is a required first step even if it's not your first rodeo.

I would suspect its true that most successful startup founders fall into the 80+ hour bucket, but I only have a handful of personal anecdata to support this (and for technical founders in the early days probably only 1/4 of that would be considered work, the rest being just an intense form of play!).

Re: Thiel, wasn't the point of that power law section meant to say that each founder should focus on what gives them leverage? I don't recall correctly.

"The Search" is the discovery of those things outside of your normal circles of concern, which makes it doubly-difficult to find _on purpose_. Felix Dennis describes the process more akin to an aware predator waiting for something to enter its kill-zone.

These successful people sound like working long hours is an absolute evil. I think they underestimate the effort that an ordinary person needs to be even moderately successful. What if it takes me twice as long to debug a problem as my team's standard? What if a concept is so simple to everyone else in my team yet it's just so hard for me to understand? What if I see an opportunity to build a truly great product, yet I don't have the required technical background while I have at most two weeks to catch up? What if I really want to tap into machine learning yet I have meetings all day, so my only choice is to study after work? Now, before you ask me to switch my career, what if I do have a passion in tech and I'm even worse at doing anything else?

See? Working long hours sometimes is not a burden, but a choice, a choice that one makes to master what they love, and to make sure they won't regret wasting their life when looking back years later. And sometimes working long hours, as long as it's voluntary, is the only way to succeed.

The whole argument is not about temporary spikes in hours to meet a goal, it's about the wrong-headed idea that one should be working 60-80+ hours on a long term basis.

Some of the proponents of long term overwork argue that it is a requirement for big successes in entrepreneurship or that people must be willing to burn themselves out to 'change the world' or other such nonsense.

Working long hours on a short term basis is not evil, but there are quite a few organizations exploiting their employees in a chase for big exits that those employees will never benefit from.

If it's a choice, that is fine. If it's an assumed baseline that management leverages to squeeze ever more "productivity" out of people without compensating them for it, then its not.

If the latter, I guarantee you will have just as much regret looking back years later. The 'voluntary' part is the gray area that most seem to talk around.

True

"I've never worked through a night. The only times I worked more than 40 hours in a week was when I had the burning desire to do so. I need 8ish hours of sleep a night. Same with everybody else, whether we admit it or not"

So he didn't. What about his employees?

Not to imply that long hours are necessary. I think they're abhorrent. But they're also endemic. Some bosses do get away with working shorter hours while they flog their employees to work like crazy. On the other hand, workaholism at many companies tends to gets worse and worse as you gain responsibility, and some of the most insane hours are worked by those near the top.

> Not to imply that long hours are necessary. I think they're abhorrent. But they're also endemic.

That's definitely true of the Bay Area, but Shopify is an Ottawa, Canada company. Having gone to college there, I don't get the feeling that Tobi is doing anything out of the ordinary for an Ottawa company. That may not be the case in Kitchener/Waterloo or Vancouver -- and it's definitely not true of the Bay Area -- but it's much less endemic out there.

It's at once nice to see but also frustrating because I feel like Ottawa tends to lack that drive, motivation and commitment broadly speaking to develop more Shopify-type companies. There's IBM, Mitel, Adobe, Blackberry, Corel and a bunch of companies selling into government out there from a tech perspective. But hey, hopefully Shopify leads the way here and we see more of them.

Shopify is something of a point of pride for Ottawa and I do wish them all the best!

For those who are not familiar, Ottawa is Canada's capital and its labour market is dominated by government jobs. It's a very 9 to 5 (actually, more like 9 to 4:30) culture and anything else would be a shock to the system for most people.

The people in Ottawa are so nice, and the bilingualism is pleasant and if you're comfortable living on the Quebec side of Ottawa, housing is dirt cheap, something like 2x or 3x gross salary.

I just wish it had a night life. The expression "nothing good in Ottawa happens after 8pm" is funny because politicians mean it one way, while people from Toronto mean it the other.

I worked there. It's clearly a more focused environment than other SV companies I've seen since. Tobi works hard and does the right thing. I think the challenge was actually the first rung of middle managers not being smart enough to understand the long term focus. That's part that's hard to scale. But the leaders walked the talk and empowered others to do so.

"Tobi works hard and does the right thing."

What does it mean to "work hard" at a white collar job when you don't work long hours?

Honestly curious.

I'm only guessing, but my definition of working hard would be:

- Staying focused on the task and cut unnecessary distractions

- Make yourself accountable and deliver what you set out to deliver

- Hold yourself to the same standards as you expect everyone else

- Be true to yourself, your beliefs and always ensure that you lead in such a way that reflects and demonstrates those values to the rest of the company

- Be smart about time management, use "uncreative" hours to get other work done

- Don't indefinitely postpone less exciting work if it is important and make it a priority to get done

- Be on time, if you schedule meetings with other people don't let them wait and value their time as much as you value your own time

- Surround yourself with other smart people and keep an open mind to ideas which differ to your own

- Control your emotions and don't make wrong choices in the moment of heat, stress or fear

- etc.

It would be really easy (especially as a founder) to not do many of these things and it takes real dedication and effort to lead by good example. I'd call that hard work.

What does “not working hard” look like? It looks like Facebook, Reddit, news.yc, YouTube, online shopping, Candy Crush, chatting with co-workers, and dicking off in the break/game room.

“Working hard” looks a lot like “not not working hard”.

Dick off as in masturbation at work? Sorry, English is not my first nor second language.

Hah; no; nothing that odd.

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=dicking%20of...

Just means wasting time

Working hard is about maintaining focus and prioritizing effectively.

There are many ways to lose focus, and shaving the yak can be a massive time suck.

I can't speak on behalf of the entire company (or even a portion of it), but anecdotally, my colleague previously worked at Shopify and said the atmosphere and culture there was very laid back. Taken in conjunction with the Twitter thread the CEO wrote, that all seems to check out.

If you read the Twitter thread [0], ostensibly they don't.

> For creative work, you can't cheat. My believe is that there are 5 creative hours in everyone's day. All I ask of people at Shopify is that 4 of those are channeled into the company.

Obviously Shopify has thousands of employees now, there's very real chance that Tobi's perception does not match the reality of the employees.

[0] https://twitter.com/tobi/status/1210242184341000192

I always like Richard Hamming’s take on hours worked: “ Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest.'' Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works ten percent more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former.” (From “You and Your Research”: https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html)

I started incorporating this thinking into my own work schedule, and I believe it to be true. I certainly found that I grew incredibly quickly in my abilities when I started working more (as long as I was applying the hours intelligently, which is admittedly its own trick)

10% more in raw hours is just 44 hours a week. This whole issue is not about companies with 40 hr work weeks versus companies with 44 hour with weeks. It's about environments where 60, 70, 80+ hours a weeks is the norm.

I think the argument can be made for doing a bit extra regularly to improve and grow. But that's not what is happening in this ridiculous hustle culture where people are burning 60-80+ hours week all year round in an effort to win the rat race by running people into the ground.

I think this is the generally accepted and obvious view, but there seems to be a push from several popular personalities to virtue signal against it in the name of better working conditions. In the process they are accusing startup founders of abusing their workforce if they mention such an idea as working a little extra to get ahead.

As they very well should.

If startup founders want to work extra - let them. But when they create a culture where they expect everyone to give the same extreme amount of sacrifice and work while they stand to gain only a fraction of what those who own the capital or have power in running the companies will gain - that is something that should be fought against as vigorously as possible on every level of society - culture, law etc.

So I applaud this "virtue signaling" and call it common sense.

Why? Other people who also want to work hard exist. If that particular startup or culture is not for you then you should leave, but don't tell everyone else what to do.

Wait but what if the founder believes that long hours do in fact get you ahead? What if that is part of what they actually did to get where they are today? Should they lie about it?

You have summed it up perfectly. It's infuriating to read through the bullshit these personalities are perpetuating without reasonable discourse.

In a "fresh out of school / fresh out of first job founder-wanting-to-build-a-startup" context, you often start with no connections, no capital, no world-class skills, no team, no game-changing idea. The only variable you can control is the amount of effort (time) you put into the venture trying to find something that works before you can no longer afford ramen. The hours are justified in that scenario, because you have no other resource to leverage outside of time.

Years later, when you're already comfortable, have a rich network of experts and trusted past associates, have easy access to capital, have decades of experience of building businesses, and a deep understanding of an industry of two? Yeah, you don't need the long hours, you're fine.

Original thread on twitter: https://twitter.com/tobi/status/1210242184341000192?s=20

I've unrolled the thread for easier reading https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1210242184341000192.html

Thanks! We changed the URL to that from https://www.businessinsider.com/shopify-ceo-success-long-hou..., which is mostly just reporting on it.

What does the s=20 do?

> What does the s=20 do?

Seems to be tacked on by Twitter to track the source of shares. Pretty sure the number changes by device.

s=20 is shared from mobile website (iOS and android tested). 21 is iOS app. Don't have others to test offhand.

There's a Twitter thread from a few years ago where a few folk collected a bunch of them, but I can't find it anymore.

Me thinks there's a bit of selection bias here.

If you're fortunate enough to hit product market fit without too much struggle ... and then can scale it as a regular company - good on you.

But I suggest in the early years, it's really not like that for most founders as they pivot and strife.

In the scale years, I suggest it probably could be more like that for most company employees and leadership. And FYI I think most companies are like this i.e. more or less 9-to-5, even very well known corps.

I also think this might have very much to do with the nature of the technology and the inherent competitiveness/barriers in the category: in companies wherein there's a significant number of talented individuals needed to focus - crunching happens.

For example: Pixar films. Apparently people work pretty long and hard to make production work. It involves a lot of specific talent, working together with ambiguous timelines and schedules, last minute creative changes.

Spotify seems to be the kind of company perhaps wherein the work can be spread out fairly efficiently thereby enabling not only 9-5 hours, but perhaps more importantly: no need for A+ Valley Top Talent. I know Ottawa very well and there isn't remotely enough raw, high end A+ talent and specialisation of skills to make something like the iPhone.

Spotify can be built with a large number of 'smart people' (which Ottawa has aplenty), but I'm doubtful there will ever be an iPhone or 'Toy Story' come out of Ottawa either (though I would desperately like to be wrong).

I really like your comment. Dealing in absolutes, either way, seems incomplete. It really does depend on the kind of market you're in and the competitors that you face.

The one distinction I find important is between working long hours because of the nature of your situation v/s working long hours because your manager/company is exploiting you. Determining if that's the case or not is up to the worker.

s/Spotify/Shopify/g

Yes, of course. Shopify.

But weirdly enough - the same might be said of Spotify.

In the sense that Stocholm is not the Valley and doesn't have A+ stars in many tech categories. But - because Sweden has a historical special relationship with the music industry, and Spotify requires 'smart people and a few geniuses but not tons of specialised geniuses' - Stockholm might make a better choice than the Valley.

One thing about Sweden though - they hit way above their weight in other, more classical industries. They're a small country that makes massive international brands, car companies - for gosh sakes they make the most complicated product category: Jet fighters. Mind you, not all of it, especially the engines, but making a 'Jet Figther' requires A+ players across a broad set of industrial categories, including a diplomatic corps that's deeply and efficiently embedded with industry, as many European countries have. Canada does not have this at all, and is probably last place in the OECD for this kind of economic cooperation.

In my opinion there's absolutely nothing to be proud about in working long hours for long stretches. All you're doing is setting up or maintaining a completely unmaintainable situation. If you're finding you have to work > 40 hours regularly, someone is making and signing off on bad estimates.

If you're salaried, and you're working extra hours regularly, all you're doing is reducing your effective hourly rate.

The reality is that there is no single answer. There are companies like Shopify that are able to build a platform while encouraging work-life balance. And then there are companies like Tesla, where employees are expected to forgo work-life balance. I think it comes down to how quickly you as a company may die if left on autopilot. I am going to guess that Shopify had near death moments, but probably fewer. OTOH, Tesla, remains in the default dead territory even now, that they are close to shipping half a million cars per year.

That said, a great work-life balance is great to strive for, just that depending on what your company does, it may or may not happen soon enough.

Shopify started off selling snowboards on the internet, Elon took on one of the most powerful, politically connected, and entrenched industries head-on.

There’s always going to be significant differences in the business dynamics and the public pressure on Tesla and their crew was insane. Unfortunately that shit rolls downhill sometimes and it’s hard to control.

Shopify also never faced the massive and constant vitriol and naysayers from day one. It was a massive play out of the gate, not a hockey stick growth but a massive capital investment covering multiple very difficult verticles all at once from design to operations to production and managing a very expensive and risky customer lifespan and regulatory risk for every car sold. Not to downplay how hard it is to do what Shopify accomplished, which was significant and very admirable. But ultimately it’s comparing apples to oranges at a high level like that.

1st week of December, I did 87 hours clocked on clockify for clients. I turn clock off when I go to the bathroom, or get distracted on HN/Reddit. It's only on while I'm coding.

But I get burnt out fast when on a schedule like that, and knew I'd have some downtime with holidays and need to fill up on work to pay bills in January. Definitely couldn't sustain hours like that unless I was CEO and it was my baby then I'd be more apt to just keep going because it's a passion project.

Its funny following this story since I saw the original tweet from Ryan Selkis a crypto twitter entrepreneur. https://twitter.com/twobitidiot/status/1209443243924045825

It has spread to take over twitter and spawned articles and CEOs of large companies weighing in, and now on hacker news. Fascinating to watch where our news starts from and how it spreads

Jason Fried was talking about this a few days ago:

https://twitter.com/jasonfried/status/1209115637148274690

I wholeheartedly agree as well. The key to working less, while being successful is to focus on what will give you the best rate of return and not doing the things that are not useful. That is really hard to figure out initially though. But I think it gets easier as you get more experienced, as your personal value system gets better tweaked to match reality.

This applies to the company as well like Jason Fried said. The company should have clear values that are attuned to market value and it should be professionally run.

I'm quite glad that working more hours isn't productive. It's good we have an inate defense against that race to the bottom. Makes the societal battle (imagine it being illegal to work more hours, deemed being unfair competition) a bit easier to win.

The word "work" is not specific enough in this context, and this whole discussion lacks nuance. When we talk about "work" are we talking about renting your own time, or building something you have a stake in? Does a side project that may give you insight into your main focus apply as work? Does reading and curiosity count as work? I spend nearly every waking hour trying to be successful... is that work? I'd like to introduce the word "toil" into the discussion. Elon Musk may "work" 100 hours a week, but there's no chance he's "toiling" 100 hours a week.

I find if you have a exciting project and you've developed a great team (which includes soft-skills; great technical skills does not necessarily make a great employee), I find a lot of team members voluntarily thinking about the project outside of hours or staying late because they want to.

Whilst more hours certainly doesn't mean more productivity, the idea of nurturing intrinsic motivation is often omitted in discussions about working late and it's more an implicit by-product of a good working environment.

I remember when I applied to work there as an iOS engineer and they didn't even phone screen me because I didn't have a strong enough social media profile.

Did they communicate this reason to you? That seems like a ridiculous requirement. Especially for engineers.

Long hours are neither necessary or sufficient to be successful, some have to work long hours just to keep their head above water.

If you hit the product market fit jackpot, long hours aren’t necessary. Until then, most of us have to grind it out.

I think the shortening of "financial and business success" to "success" can be a bit unfortunate.

My big metric for success is currently how many hours I can spend on my bike a week while still feeding myself and providing for loved ones responsibly.

This is really a lovely thread. In general I loathe working at large companies and try to avoid it, but this really changes my perception of Shopify. The fact is that people who say they work 80 hours don't really do it. If they ever do it it's a rare event in the totality of their labor.

If Tesla took Shopify's advice it will be dead right now. Every scenario is different.

Working long hours is for the poor who need to make the rent. Not for successful.

let's see what happens if he starts today all over again. He forgot to mention the most important thing, that he was at the right place and right time. No matter how you come up with a 1000x better Shopify today, you most probably won't go anywhere. Many clunky business projects that were started with the rise of social media (around 2004-2013) made their owners kings ONLY because they were at the right place and time. The free ride is over. His argument is mostly bullshit for anyone starting today, the internet is much more centralized and you can't go viral unless you spend a fortune assuming having a superior product. It's a billion times harder today to succeed with a great product today than with a barely average one 15 years ago.

I don't think that argument holds at all. The low hanging fruit from 10 years ago has been picked. But in a lot of ways we only see it as low hanging fruit in hindsight. Today there are new business opportunities that in 10 years will seem like they were low hanging fruit. There are new technologies today that will enable new businesses that wouldn't have been feasible before.

Even then, there are only going to be but so many companies that get to the kind of scale of Shopify and that was true 15 years ago, and it's true today. But there is plenty of room for new small and medium sized companies to make millions of dollars. Success doesn't always have to be at the 3 comma level.

I get your argument and I appreciate it. But the nature of those low hanging fruit are more complicated today. For example, you can't just recreate Twitter, Facebook, Reddit today in your home with a couple of friends with no solid experience. You similarly can't start most successful SaaS ideas that were started in 2010-2014. Most successful YouTubers started their channels around 2008-2011. This was a time when you could make a very successful venture relying on the viral marketing by social media and Google search. Nowadays, this is over. You can go and try this same hippie way for starting a small business today but your chances of success are 1000x lower. The internet is much bigger, and it's much more centralized and concentrated and the competition is much more harsher.

Snapchat was founded in 2011 when people thought there couldn't be any other successful social media company. On the other hand, Salesforce, an epitome of SAAS, was founded in 1999. I believe there are always business opportunities and I'd argue there are more opportunities today because the space is more complicated and the cost of starting a company is much lower than before.

I don't necessarily disagree with your argument, but Snapchat might not be the best example. Snap has never posted a profit and their stock, even after a rise of almost 275% this calendar year, is still 42% below its IPO price.

In jobs that don't compensate overtime, that have no improved networking component after hours, and suffer from declined cognitive output after 6-8 hours you absolutely shouldnt work longer

Success is never defined

What's unfortunate is that on the other side of the coin, "rockstar CEOs" like Elon Musk claim they sleep 4 hours a night and work 90 hour weeks. I think Musk does this mostly for publicity/image reasons and not that it's actually true, but you've got plenty of wantapreneurs parroting this (imo) unhealthy lifestyle.

With the inordinate amount of time Musk spends on Twitter, I'm gonna go ahead and assume most of those 90 hours are not productive.

Most people (and competitors) underappreciate how well Elon manages requirements over Twitter.

If you want to know why he selected the features for the Cybertruck, go back 1 year when he asked the desired features on Twitter. It's crazy how many of those small looking features (like a bed for normal sized / tall people, lighting in the back) were included in all models.

Also he's averaged about 2 tweets a day over the hols and it's often less. It's probably not a huge amount of time.

Considering the amount of publicity he gets from Twitter, they can definitely be considered productive.

I wouldn’t count it as productive when the outcome is he has to spend time in court explaining himself later. I’d venture to guess the time spends directing his employees is whether all the productivity happens.

Reddit AMA:

>How much do you sleep per night, on average?

>ElonMuskOfficial: I actually measured this with my phone! Almost exactly 6 hours on average.

The 4 hour thing seems kind of made up by journalists for clickbait as far as I can tell from a brief google. Though he was up last night working on Starship stuff that seems quite cool https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1210649166407438336

And we've seen the news stories here that his employees would hope he wouldn't "work" at their department because he'd often change things or otherwise slow them down affecting quality and quantity

> sleep 4 hours a night

This is not healthy or impressive, and it may be the first sign of dementia for many people.

He runs three companies which are changing the future of humanity though. Not some ecommerce gig. He is an outlier.

There is anecdotal information that he does indeed do what he claims. And he is the most impressive CEO in this generation, perhaps in history, so long hours must work for some people.

Or his sleep patterns are completely orthogonal to his success.

That is hard to imagine isn't it? Sleep is a pretty big deal.

CEO is different from employee with no stake in the company. Sure, he probably does spend 80+ hours on his companies, but he's enjoying it. He's not beholden to any expectations of a manager. He's spending time reading/exploring/chatting and including that as 90 hours of work. Musk has no line drawn between work and play. I think Musk flaunts this public image to encourage a breakdown of work and play, not to say you should spend 90 hours checking boxes your manager gave you.

> And he is the most impressive CEO in this generation, perhaps in history, so long hours must work for some people.

Even if we assume the first statement is true, which is a big if, it still doesn't necessarily support the idea that working long hours is good. After all, you can't tell whether he was successful because of, or despite the long hours.

I think there's something to be said for the nature of the work you are doing. If you absolutely love what you're doing, you can burn hours long and fast and hard. I think Elon gets his head wrapped around a problem and just eats lives and breathes that problem to the point that the long hours are natural. I've been there on stuff, where I have to fight to tear myself away rather than fighting to keep myself doing it. The latter sucks and will destroy you quickly, but the former isn't so bad for the psyche.

> ... he is the most impressive CEO in this generation, perhaps in history

How anyone can say this with a straight face blows my mind when even in the tech vertical he has some serious competition (are we forgetting about Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, etc.), let alone actual historical figures like Henry Ford, John Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt, etc.

It's too early to judge. If he accomplishes his goal of establishing permanent and self-sustaining human settlements on other worlds then he may end up being the most important person ever, not just CEO.

His goals, at least, are ambitious in a way that those of the other people you mentioned aren't (except possibly Bezos, but Bezos doesn't laser focus on this stuff the same way Musk does).

There is no such thing as the most important person ever... all he did was fund some interesting ideas, which other people actually built. If we are going to single someone out for being the most important person ever, then that person would need to have some enormous achievement completed without the help of others.

>How anyone can say this with a straight face blows my mind

Elon is the only person to ever start four 1bn+ companies (paypal, tesla, SpaceX, Solarcity). He has/is driving innovation across multiple industries on a time scale that I don't think any of the people you mentioned can really touch, not to mention hyperloop and the Boring Company. Its not even debatable IMO.

> Elon is the only person to ever start four 1bn+ companies (paypal, tesla, SpaceX, Solarcity).

He didn't start Tesla. He was retroactively allowed to be called founder after being in their Series A.

He didn't start Paypal. It merged with Musk's company.

He didn't start Solarcity - Tesla acquired it 10 years after it was founded.

I'd still say that John Rockefeller is more impressive. Adjusted for inflation John Rockefeller's company Standard Oil was worth over $1 trillion.

Or Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, the guy who started the Dutch East India company, which adjusted for inflation was worth over $8.2 trillion.

Modern companies have nothing on what entrepreneurs did in the past and how much money they made. It doesn't matter how many markets Elon Musk "disrupts" nothing he can do will ever match the impact that the Dutch East India company had on the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_East_India_Company

>I'd still say that John Rockefeller is more impressive. Adjusted for inflation John Rockefeller's company Standard Oil was worth over $1 trillion dollars. >Or Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, the guy who started the Dutch East India company

Yeah, it's amazing what those guys could get away with back in the days of slavery and before regulation. /sarcasm

Yep to be clear I think Standard Oil and Dutch East India company did a lot of bad things. And that's part of the point... If you are saying Elon Musk is impressive just because he started four companies that are worth a lot of money that means nothing. There are better ways to judge a CEO, and better ways to build a company, and that's what the Shopify CEO was saying in his Twitter thread.

Standard Oil was founded in 1870, five years after the 13th amendment completely abolished slavery in the US.

Rockefeller's success is attributed to his relentless pursuit of horizontal and vertical integration, not cheap labor via slavery.

Hence the >and before regulation.

From the Wikipedia article on Dutch East India Company:

"The company has been criticised for its monopolistic policy, exploitation, colonialism, uses of violence, and slavery."

I'm pretty sure many of the today's companies would do just as well or even better if they could have their own military force and free ticket on slavery.

Microsoft and Apple are both worth over 1T at the moment.

Granted, DEIC is in a league of its own, but it was also a state sponsored company, more akin to Saudi-ARAMCO (2T).

Well sure, but these guys did not make that much money because they were better CEO's, they benefited from the context of the times. What Musk has done with Tesla and SpaceX, simultaneously is absolutely mind blowing and it is hard to imagine anyone topping that, like ever. He created incredibly successful companies in some of the most competitive, most capital intensive, most research driven businesses that exist. It is amazing to me the man is not given his proper due. What he did was super-human and, in the long, could actually put a dent in the Universe.

It is absolutely debatable. Moreover, why would you post something on a public forum like this that wasn’t debatable? This rhetoric is a bit lazy and baity.

Long hours or continuous working exhausts. This does not lead to productive work. Creative work is key and that depends upon flexibility.

I think we're all rooting for the narrative that it's possible to get ahead working 9-5. But it's hard for me to ignore the survivorship bias at play here. Yes, if your company has a market cap in the billions, you probably don't need to be grinding on the weekends anymore. If you've built a company with amazing programmers and predictable revenue (e.g., dhh/Jason Fried) you probably don't need to grind weekends.

But when you're at the front lines, striving to create something new, you'll be competing against very motivated entrepreneurs. These entrepreneurs will often have more resources than you, and zero aversion to working weekends. In those circumstances, Tobi's lifestyle probably isn't going to cut it. When an entrepreneur is working to create that spark, it pays to be completely obsessed, sometimes for years.

Thankfully, very few of us are on the front lines struggling to launch something momentous. Tobi once was, but he was smart and surrounded by great people, and now he's in scaling mode, which seems like a much different beast. I'm grateful that he and other successful tech leaders don't force their teams to work as hard as they needed to in the early days.

> But it's hard for me to ignore the survivorship bias at play here.

Surely it works the other way as well -- for all the stories of people who worked all night to achieve success, there are others about people who either did so and didn't win, or worse yet burnt themselves out or hurt their lives in other ways.

This.

Everyone thinks their experience reflects an universal truth.

That's the one big error, in my opinion.

What I learned in my life is, find your individual way. Don't play other peoples games, play your own game.

Pick what you need from the system and throw the rest away.

I'm bad at standing up before 12 and even worse at working 40h a week.

I'm don't like doing the same stuff for years.

I'm bad at networking for work, most people I meet there are just boring or upsetting to me.

All these things set me up for failure, still I'm doing better than most of my friends who are better at these things by a mile.

I think his point was more about focus. If you know what you’re doing, you can do it on any (reasonable) timeline you want.

Most entrepreneurs are just chasing money like a Leprechaun. Wherever it goes, you follow. Run, turn, grind, pivot.

Shopify has always been really focused. Moves slower than the competition in many ways. They’ve been at it for 15 years. Mostly behind the scenes, not the sexiest stuff.

When you have a simple business you don’t have to grind weekends to try and convince someone to give you more money. The business is self sustaining and profitable.

I've never worked through a night. The only times I worked more than 40 hours in a week was when I had the burning desire to do so.

...never...

Shopify is obsessed with growth like every other public company. They are nothing like Basecamp. They can get away with shorter hours, maybe, because Canadian salaries are relatively low compared to San Francisco, but something will eventually have to give.

Maybe Shopify’s growth is actually due to their shorter hours. Study after study shows this to be true, but for some reason the Bay Area can’t wrap their minds around that fact. In all likelihood Bay Area companies would be more productive if they forced their employees to go home after 40 hours.

whats the average hours for FAANG in SV? 60-65 ?

It depends what hours you are trying to count. In the office? Remote? Actually 'working'? Including shuttle time? In my FAANG circle, small N, none of those values would be above 40 hours a week, except possibly if you include shuttle time. Certainly not anything approaching an average of 60-65 hours a week. That's averaging a 12-13 hour day, in a 10am-4pm core hour culture.

I'm at a unicorn in the bay area, and I'd say it's under 45. It depends on the day, and I occasionally check on work in the evening, but that's rare. My hours in the office are about 45, but that includes breakfast and a long lunch.

I've also been pleasantly surprised about the unlimited vacation. I started late in the year, and the company isn't really busy near Christmas. But I've already taken a decent amount of vacation.

The average is probably around 45. 60-65 are the high hand numbers. Some people in SV do less than 40 real hours of work, a lot 40-45 and some do a few days/weeks of a stretch above 50h but let's not fall into the fallacy that everyone is working +60 hours all the time.

> For creative work, you can't cheat. My believe is that there are 5 creative hours in everyone's day. All I ask of people at Shopify is that 4 of those are channeled into the company.

He's practically asking to put company success before personal growth. That's incredibly selfish if you ask me.

That's not how I read it.

Some others, with job titles similar to him, speak of "giving 110%" and how their employees are so dedicated to the company, they gladly take on overtime and crunch and whatnot. This seems refreshingly honest to me in comparison.

Using his math, there's 35 creative hours per person per week; assuming a 5-day work week, he's _paying_ for 20 of those and leaving 15 for personal growth. Sure, some might prefer a different ratio, but at least he's acknowledging that there needs to be a balance.

I think it's wrong to celebrate a company that claims 80% of what it is to be you, even when other companies claim even more. I question the reason behind us devoting ourselves to these undemocratic structures.

I worked at Shopify for 4 1/2 years. I was happy to devote those creative hours because I believe in the mission. It's where I wanted my energy to be spent, and this was the general sentiment.

You have to remember most of the people who work there can work almost anywhere. They have specifically chosen to dedicate 80% of their creative energy at Shopify.

Why did you leave? (I am just curious) I am considering applying for the company in the coming months.

I needed some serious change in my life. Stepping away from Shopify was very difficult, but felt like a good first step in where I was personally.

Honestly, I think about going back almost weekly. It's a fantastic company.

Long hours aren't necessary for success, and you should do what works for you, but they’re needed if you're aiming for the top in your field.

It's an inconvenient truth, but you're not going to be able to reach the John Carmacks of the world if you're working 40 and they're working 60: https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/1210593150303031296

Anyone who thinks he would've achieved the same with far fewer hours are just kidding themselves and pulling crabs down into the bucket. Also implicit in that is Carmack being a fool for working 60, when he would've been as or more(!) effective with less? Nonsense.

Founding and being the CEO of Shopify, a $48bn company and one of the best-performing stocks of the last few years, isn't "the top"?

Different people have different styles that work for them. Some people love to work 60+ hours and are productive doing it, others get more and better work done when they limit themselves to 40 and take time off. What works for you/Tobi/John doesn't universally work for others.

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