Why 37signals style of work might not apply to early startups? | Hacker News Reader

Why 37signals style of work might not apply to early startups?

rvivek.com

28 pointsrvivek14 comments

You are wrong. Work-life balance is extremely important, and suggesting otherwise is dangerous. First of all, health and well-being should always be your primary concern, and forcing your employees to throw that off balance is close to criminal.

Anecdote from past experience: Last year I worked at a successful startup, seeing it through an acquisition by a Fortune 50 company. At first, the startup was great… it pushed its employees to their very limits and shipped some pretty cool software. But one-by-one, the employees could not take it any longer, and pretty much the entire original team is gone. In its now almost 5 years of existence, very few people stayed for more than a year.

Personally, I'm a pretty good developer. I've done some very cool shit, and I love what I do. But if you expect me to be all work and no play, the quality of my work is going to start to decline very quickly, and I'm going to stop having fun and quit very soon. I live by the motto "work hard, play harder." I have no problem fixing the servers on a weekend, or staying at work late. But if you expect me to consistently work more than is fair, or are gonna give me shit for arrive late or leaving early, then it's not gonna work out.

The reality is that the vast majority of successful startups do work very long hours and push themselves to the limit.

Only once a company is established and has a successful product can you begin to see huge leverage off of every hour of work, so that working crazy hours becomes optional (e.g. you have 10,000 customers and a proven sales model, so a 0.1% improvement is worth a lot.) The fact is that it's really really hard to build something from the ground up.

If you want nice confortable work/life balance and 40 hour work weeks, you need to go work at Google or IBM etc. The startup world is not for you.

I've only worked at startups and never found that anyone asked me to work one more hour than I wanted to. I have always been considered a top or the top contributor on every team I've been on so no one really has thought to hassle me I guess.

I have avoided companies where the founders worked too many hours for my taste. I think it's unhealthy and I have two daughters who need me around more than the company does. I just don't want or need the pressure to stay late.

I'm not sure that's true. It certainly isn't in my case. Most of the successful startups I've been around actually have done quite the opposite (including my own.. I'm comfortable calling us "successful" now).

While there are periods of insanity, the overall cadence of a successful startup (again in my experience) trends towards sanity. Very people in the world have the mental endurance to keep a super intense level up for a long period of time. The founders who recognize that (again, in my experience) tend to have better outcomes.

One thing to note: there is a curious thing about startup founders. I've always found it interesting that when they draw up the narrative of their startups path they tend to emphasize those long periods of work while minimizing the (more common) periods of relative calm. As an outsider you think everyone is working 80-100 hour weeks. From their stories, you'd believe it too. The reality doesn't always match the narrative tho. Just ask the social network.

Well it makes success seem more like the result of hard work and not dumb luck-which seems to very often factor into things.

hard work can be achieved in a reasonable amount of hours, not only by "keeping your chair warm" for 100 not-so-productive hours a week.

you wouldn't say a smart student aces tests out of dumb luck since he doesn't do much work.

You can't argue "You are wrong." with only an anecdote :P. Also, I don't think your company is still a start-up after 5 years... The author's point is precisely "When you are starting up," not 5 years down the road.

In your anecdote the team pushed themselves to the limit and succeeded. Contradicts your advice.

"Only when the last tree has died and the last river has been poisoned and the last fish has been caught, will we realise that we cannot eat money"

Staff shouldn't be treated as some kind of natural resource to be burned through and discarded after 12 months just to make a few bucks for investors when you flip. I'd classify that as the hollowest form of "success."

You are pleading for the wrong thing here. I don't think a manager cares about how you think his employee should work. Or how "hollow" the success is.

At an ethical/moral level, they should care, but at a business level, they should also care. Every time a staff member walks out the door, how much does it cost a company in terms of replacing them?

Not to mention the kind of bad will employee horror stories can generate in the talent pool you're trying to hire from.

The end doesn't always justify the means.

Regarding both work/life balance and remote teams, I would say that it depends. We all see fairly small sample sizes in our working lives, but I've had much more success with a team that worked 8hrs/5days than the crazy 90/100 hour weeks. I think there is huge value in downtime, both to keep at-work productivity high and sustainable, but also to provide time to reflect on what we are doing.

That. Downtime to reflect on what we're doing is huge.

From Will Durant's The Heroes of History, on da Vinci's work style:

"Leonardo had no trouble explaining...that an artist's most important work lies in conception rather than in execution, and (as Vasari put it) 'men of genius do most when they work least.'"

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