You are being a little broad with this statement. One can easily put in 60+ hours for weeks on end and be incredibly productive while doing it. Its all circumstantial. If you have no family, are the sole founder in the company, and really enjoy what you are doing, why the fuck would you stop at a 40 hour work week?
Not all of us loathe the thing we do for the majority of our waking hours.
However, most people do not run their own business. Most people are low-level code monkeys in large firms where individual efforts aren't business critical. When your project gets cancelled for the 3rd time and you still get a raise, it finally clicks that your work doesn't really matter. This takes a psychological toll. As a result, most people I know in FAANG who are 28+ years old will sheepishly admit that they do very little actual work (30 hours max per week). That's the whole point of hiring people straight out of college: you get ~5 years out of them before they realize what the game is. The ones who are happy with the "truth" become managers, and the ones who aren't opt to keep their head down and coast, or just quit from "burnout".
The only exception I'd personally make is to found a startup with people I enjoy on a problem that I'm personally motivated by. This is basically a band for capitalistic nerds. Even then, you still have to allow VCs to suck out your soul.
Did not realise believing in a mission is akin to joining a suicide cult.
Work doesn’t have to suck. It doesn’t have to be everyone’s calling. But it is for some of us, and sixty+ hours a week can be time well spent. My time at start-ups has been time around colleagues I love, work I enjoy and a mission I believe in. (I was also decently compensated while there and exorbitantly so on the upside.)
There are countless public servants, non-profit employees, artists and public-company workers putting in those hours and more finding reward in their work. No need to deem everyone who doesn’t fit your lifestyle an idiot.
Me? I'd rather do what I can to make Art. So it's nice that I can get a software company to subsidize it thoroughly.
I'm just glad I can get paid effectively for being Skilled instead of laboring with my Skill. Availability is the best ability after all.
It's a suckers game: the default behavior needs to be "when the founders get greedy and kick me out...what will I do then? How will I feel about that time?"
If the work is for financing a life outside it, yes. But if the work is rewarding in itself, then said failure is—while highly disappointing—balanced by the relationships, stories and skills gained therefrom.
This is absolutely a risk tolerance and personality matrix thing. I just want to push back against this recently-popular philosophy which idealises the Western European work ethic and lifestyle. It is one among many local optima.
Employees are too likely to be screwed over, even if the company is successful
I will agree with you - it's probably batshit insane for a working stiff without a good chance of a $2mm+ payout to be working 60+ hours/week for years on end.
Amdahl's Law
Even in your example, being productive for 60+ hours is possible, but for how long? There might be extreme (extreme!) outliers, but I think it's fair to say that at some point you will increase your productivity by putting in less hours.
It's the kind of question where I wouldn't really believe your answer, unless you've actually tried to experiment yourself where is the cutoff (for your specific situation) between hours / productivity.
Not because I think you would answer in bad faith, but because it's a really complex question. What if working less hours over multiple years would let you pursue some hobby, turn you more sociable and thus a better leader/CEO?
Or maybe it would make you just very slightly better at decision making. You would have less time to manage your company, maybe relying more on others, but in exchange you would have more energy for the really crucial decisions. Or enough energy for extending that 2-weeks international crowdfunding effort into a 3-weeks.
It is a very unhealthy industry. I am not sure if it can be sustained in it’s current form, but I don’t ever see the hours being reduced either. 4 day work weeks would just mean 12+ hour days and you would have to hope your clients aren’t open on Fridays or whatever day you decided to make your company day off. Staggering days wouldn’t work that well as most agencies have little to no redundancy by design.
Again, this leads to burnout and employees that are sufficiently burned out either quit or are fired for no longer being able to meet the productivity requirement and/or making mistakes. The agency does not care because the supply of recent college graduates in marketing and communications is never ending (it is one of the most popular majors at almost any college/university).
Interestingly, slower work to a point is better for the agency since they bill the client per hour. That reverses when the quality of work suffers or the employee is no longer able to get everything done that was promised to the client. The agency gets more value out of a single employee when they work longer hours. Bonuses are common in the agency world, but they are typically meager compared to the extra hours worked. Burning out their junior employees is then to the advantage of an agency that bills by the hour.
yeah in this case, if its really your dream, go right ahead.
most workers aren't the founders of the company.
Do you have an objective measure of that? I've worked with plenty of people who thought they were being productive for 60+ hours/week, but none of their productivity actually stacked up. Founder/CTO types were the worst, they'd bypass process and cause outages but because of their position everyone had to coddle their ego and pretend that they were doing good work and the trouble wasn't their fault.
You asked about objective measures, but I’m not sure how programming can really be quantified. All I can say is my “hyper-mode” has caused projects to reach deadlines that others on the team thought were unlikely.
So that's... maybe 20% of the workforce?
> are the sole founder in the company
And with this we narrow it down to maybe 1% or less of the workforce.
He can be broad because your conditions don't apply to the overwhelming majority of workers. Statistically, your conditions cover an insignificant group.
Hyperbole is to be expected.
You sound like you're having a bad day outside of HN, as this has been just a regular and might I say, civil, chat, otherwise.
A temporary break from HN (or social media in general), might not be a bad idea :-)