Work/Life Balance at a Startup -- Just a Pipedream?
jeanhsu.com
jeanhsu.com
This is an example of a social pathology on two levels. First, it means that working for that one particular company sucks. Second, it is being deployed to make working sucks normative at other companies, too. (And if it gets widely repeated by credulous entrepreneurs, it will infect their lives, their employees lives, etc etc. The viral factor of suck in the social graph has exceeded k = 1.0, watch out!)
It has not been my experience that the narrative this social pathology tells about work being necessarily all-consuming has basis in objective reality. I've done all-consuming work. My business' schedule doesn't resemble that schedule even a little itty-bitty bit.
Certainly my experience of coding is that you can do extra hours for a short while and get some benefit but more than a couple of weeks and that starts falling away pretty rapidly.
Even in the short term though it's limited. Beyond midnight (assuming that I've started at 9am-ish and worked relatively solidly) I'm pretty much breaking as much as I'm fixing, plus I tend to be setting myself up for a pretty significant productivity hit the day after.
Sure there are those days when you're knackered so you just tidy your inbox, sort out your expenses and so on but most people really don't have that much work of that nature to do.
If your guys can't get it done in a normal timeframe they never will.
Especially so if your guys are already working 70 hrs/week. Adding another 20 won't help you. Go back to the drawing board, plan better, go MVP for each iteration etc...
So, why don't we simply agree that you are in a different business than the OP's company?
You are a one-man operation who scales by outsourcing; they are a team who scale by hiring through investment ($1M).
You want careful, measured growth; they want superfast growth, whatever the cost.
You are an efficient time manager, who's built "passive" income and chooses to spend a lot of time on HN just for fun; they work crazy hours in the hope of making it really big some day, even if the personal cost today is high.
I'm sure a typical overworked startup could benefit from adopting some of your ways, but it is equally hard for them to see your point as it is for you to see theirs. You haven't been on the other side.
When you say, "they", you're talking about entrepreneurs who have made a personal choice to make that sacrifice; or, a team of entrepreneurs who have agreed, amongst themselves, to all make that sacrifice together.
I read Patrick's argument as railing against the kind of "entrepreneurs" who are really just free-loading, glorified managers that get angry when anyone on the team starts "slacking" (i.e., working less than 80-100 hours / week) because they're relying on the hard work of other people to bring them their fortune instead of actually doing anything themselves.
When I talk to a potential employer, I make a point of telling them that I work 40 hour weeks and I take a lot of time off. I've gone so far as to negotiate away my stock options in favor of extra paid holiday and the ability to take unpaid leave. Even when working for startups that think they're in crunch mode (and have been for the last 6 months), I make Life a priority.
Where I can, I try to spread the faith. Surprisingly, I've never experienced a case where I couldn't fix things and had to leave.
Stress is infectious. But so is Sanity. I've walked into shops where 60 hour weeks were the norm and managed to infect the team with the concept of Work/Life balance. First, you introduce the idea of "the weekend", where I'm living the back of my truck next to a crag someplace (and so should you), so don't try to contact me. Then you bring in "leave at six", then eventually "40 hour weeks". All the while keeping the rest of the team on board with the idea that maybe we should have lives apart from work.
Eventually, you have a whole team working 40 hour weeks and not looking so unhealthy. Some of whom even have stories to tell when you ask what they did for the weekend. Better still, if everybody is slacking off at a sane pace, there's really nothing that management can do about it (except notice how much more work is getting done).
We pretty much do normal hours (10 - 6), we still work a few evenings, but we're now both full time so haven't got the added stress of a 'day job'. It was always our dream to be able to work full time on our startup and now that's a reality there is honestly no other job i'd rather be doing. We both get to see our kids everyday, i'm due to be taking my eldest (4) swimming at lunch.
Based on my experience (every startup is different), we do live and breath it, but at the same time we always make time for family, holidays and anything else we want to do (taking the kids for days out, nursery, the gym). Our startup is actually doing better than ever and I personally feel that because we put in all the work in the first few years whilst holding down a full time job we are now in a position to be able to enjoy the fruits of our labour and have a great work/life balance.
My gut feeling is that developers who cultivate a lifestyle that will inevitably lead to them burning out are either drinking the koolaid of some kind of cliched' notion of how developers should perform, or are simply being exploited by their employers.
Everyone has a right to see their family and keep fit, and in this sellers market, developers CAN work at a sustainable pace that doesnt put their future careers at stake.
Note: I have founded startups (a long time ago now) that very much went with the traditional startup culture but have also worked at small new companies that didn't have this culture at all but still did pretty well.
For founders, the question loses some of its meaning, because the company itself is intrinsically tied to personal goals. Founders tend to not refer to the company as "a job". It's something of a different beast. This doesn't mean that some time doing non-company stuff won't ever be required to maintain sanity, but the dynamics are pretty different.
For employees, which this post seems to be about, you're ultimately working to fulfill someone else's personal goals. There it makes a lot more sense to balance working on your own personal goals and pastimes or whatever with working on the goals of the person who's signing your paychecks. The problem is that if there's a sufficient supply of employees who are willing to forgo that for whatever reason (loving the work, not having much of a life, peer pressure) then they're more likely to be favored by the employers with the implications that go along with that.
Now you know why relationship won't work for me at this stage of time?
So whenever someone told me that they could have a nice work/life balance at a startup, I smiled. And when girls told me that they would support their husbands in pursuing their dreams at all cost, I could only conclude that they didn't know what they wish for.
They haven't seen the true cost of startup, yet.
When I read something like this, I sometimes wonder what the intention of people of running a startup is. Is it really about creating an app? The app/startup will be forgotten at some point in time anyways. So why are you doing it, if it isn't for the personal freedom that comes along with a startup (eventually) and that enables you to spend more time with the people you care about?
I mean, it is just a startup. The people might care to some degree about your product, but they don't care about you at all and you shouldn't care too much either.
I know that the "work hard" mantra is ridiculously widespread in the startup culture and especially in the US and I also know the feeling that one's mind always comes up with new ideas, whether you want it or not.
However, I prefer to work on my startup 5 to 10 hours a week, just enough to get decent money from it, be ahead of competitors and make plans or delegate the work that needs to be done.
I think the real trick in startups is not to spend as much time as possible, but as few time as possible and still get good results. At least, that is how it works for me and how it supports the general idea, why I run a startup at all: to increase my personal freedom.
You are choosing, right now, that the next thirty minutes of work on whatever is more important than calling mom. It may be. Is it always? I'm downright fascist about not wasting time on low-value activities at work and I still leak huge portions of my schedule. Are you sure that never happens? I mean, by the end of a week at 100%, I'm barely mentally capable of evaluating whether coding will be productive, to say nothing of actually coding. You've been doing that for years? How do the metrics look?
I believe, if you cannot afford taking a break from your startup, your startup has a conceptual problem.
I assume you imagine some nightmare scenario where you find yourself living on the street begging for change and repeating to yourself over and over "Why did I take that evening off??? What was I thinking???"
In reality, it probably isn't quite that critical. I suggest you try an experiment: Work an 8 hour day tomorrow.
Don't make up for it by working 16 hours the next day. Work the rest of your week as normal, then look back and see if there is any noticeable negative ramification from that day of slacking.
Then try ramping it up. Work a 60 hour week. Work a 50 hour week, god forbid. Living in a ditch yet? Good. Try 45 hours next week.
As the people below are trying to tell you, most of this desperation is in your head. Yes, you need to work hard and deliver. But you don't need to kill yourself.
IMHO, behind most, if not all, of the stories of "herculean entrepreneurs" sacrificing everything to spend 100 hours a week on their startup, you'll find the same false martyrdom. People spend 100 hours a week on their startup because it makes them feel important and makes them feel like their working their hardest. The sad reality is that's only going to be effective if your work is mindless grunt work.
Weird for a culture that so prizes data and science to endlessly repeat certain mantras as truth without any validation.
Ultimately, the right balance depends on your own perspective on life, which in term depends on your age, personality, family situation, etc. But the older I get the more convinced I become that you can't go wrong if you err on the side of life.
Steve Blank wrote a great post about how to navigate this tricky balance of startup/family and what worked for him. It's here: http://steveblank.com/2009/06/18/epitaph-for-an-entrepreneur...
Many startups (and companies) need to go to a psychiatric hospital, they are very unorganized and the team leaders doesn't take full responsability and respect for people times.
Another thing is being really focused and concentrated on moving forward in your 40 hours week (not checking HN too much...) and doing extra hours when it's really necessary.
I have tried to work 80-100 hours on several occasions for a month or so and just ended up ripping up most of what I wrote. I have settled into an average of about a 65 hour workweek by picking up the laptop whenever I feel like it and stopping when I feel the pointless churn beginning. My output, as measured by Pivotal Tracker is much higher working less hours, point being my meaningful productivity is higher.
If I had an employee working that much of their own volition, I would start offer help on their process and would want to work with them on why they are approaching things in such a brute-force manner.
I would also see it as a failure on my part to set the right expectations with customers, investors, etc...
Work/Life balance is relative, but I don't think anyone can sustain a quality output at 80 hours a week for more than 3 weeks or so.
Plus I enjoy what I do in the office, it can be stressful but its not like 12-16 hours hard physical labour.
I dont work weekends though other than answer email or support requests
You need to quantify what "better" means here to even begin to answer this question:
- better for your mental health to take a break or have some fun?
- better for your code quality to not introduce mistakes due to tiredness?
- better from some economic standpoint because you petceive the increased value in what you produce to be greater than what you value xbox-time at?
We started 5 years ago - I've been on call 24/7 ever since. We've now got other people on call too, sure, but as the technical lead, I'm where the buck stops. An average week is in the region of 70-80 hours work.
I have precious little in the way of "life" - I allow myself a few hours off once a week on Thursdays, but apart from that, spend my time glued to my laptop, growing the business.
That said, I see several ways out.
1) This sucker actually works, and we retire. 2) This sucker actually works, and we grow it into a behemoth. 3) Ditto and we sell, and I re-invest the proceeds into my next mad idea.
1 is pretty unlikely. 2&3 are far more likely, which rather reflects the fact that my work is my life, and if you're doing a startup without that attitude, it's going to suffer. A startup is effectively all about selling a "regular" 20/30's for a decade (or two) of brutally hard work, high stress, and attaining financial and inventive freedom.
Sorry, I'm rambling. No coffee yet this morning.
It's funny you say "more likely" when the odds are still, to be blunt, stacked against you (I'm not trying to be a jerk, but you probably realize it's all still a longshot).
Ultimately I think your value function has to heavily and positively weight the work you're doing for 12 hours a day. If you're missing your free time I don't see how any rational person can voluntarily continue working those hours.
As to 2&3 - we've already had a few substantial (8 figure, cash) offers for the business, but we've passed them up, as they were the wrong buyers at the wrong time.
I hate to be the one to point it out, but what you're experiencing is very far from my definition of "Success". I mean sure, according to your definition you're definitely perspiring, but isn't there supposed to be some form of payoff at some point?
All 3 of your potential forecasted outcomes lead to you not having a life any time soon. As such, it looks like you've set yourself up in a way that precludes success, as many of us define it.
For me, a successful software business is one that provides the maximum income (and thus free time) possible for the smallest effort. That's what software's so good at: turning tiny amounts of work into big benefits. As such, the ultimate goal is zero effort and infinite free time. You seem to have contrived the opposite for yourself.
Ultimately, I guess it depends on what you want out of it - if you're after a lifestyle business, what you describe is just fine. If you're after total global domination, it's back-breaking effort for a number of years (or a huge injection of capital up-front, although that's generally a good way to lose sight of what you're doing).
There's nothing wrong with growing a business steadily for 5 years. Speaking for myself, we've been doing it for 4, and somehow I don't feel like a miserable failure.
Any attempts to pin down why and under what circumstances [2] different work hour guidelines should apply would be greatly appreciated.
1: See studies in this pdf http://www.lostgarden.com/2008/09/rules-of-productivity-pres...
2: What's the difference between starting your own company, running your own company, joining a startup, doing a PhD, being in a research team, working at an established startup?
There indeed are stretches when one gets carried by passion and can work (almost) 24/7. One should use that wave. But when you find yourself disliking what you're doing you better stop and not write posts as in the OP.
OP is just making up excuses for feeling of guilt one feels divided between family and promise they made to themselves/somebody else. To me it seems like excuses fat people have about losing weight - or drunks about stopping drinking (when catch yourself saying - shit x is wrong and I dislike shit y in my life, but I'm still doing great - some red lights should start spinning).
To OP if you're reading this - look into mirror take a deep breath and admit that you're a workaholic. There are some "mommy" and "daddy" issues in your soul you need to resolve. You're using your work to punish yourself for something you're not even guilty of.