90 Hours a Week and Loving It
folklore.org
folklore.org
Hey boss, you're paying me $100/hour, but I'll work twice as much! Now you'll only be paying me $50/hour, and the best part is that I'm loving it!
This is why people in healthcare work long hours too, because they care about patients. And it's why salaries stay low, because of this passion.
I often refer to one startup I was at as the worst experience (the manager was horrible - including griping at me for being off grid for my then wife's bday weekend), but most interesting (the technology was all over the map and there was a feeling of "how the hell is this actually working").
Never again.
That is one is the most annoying.
One team (your job is whatever we say it is)
You are an owner (we gave you fuck-all stock and lied that we're all gonna be millionaires when this IPOs)
Radical candour (prepare to be dressed down publicly, because all the best leaders do that: Besos, Jobs, Trump)
It's even better when they get the first letter from each of these little snippets of company philosophy and turn them into a word that then gets printed on swag baseball caps and t-shirts, and is roared by the cocaine fuelled CEO at the end of every weekly allhands.
The book 'One Device' about the iPhone has interviews with the original team who built it. They discuss how a number of them had marriages broken and whatnot from the pressure to build the iPhone.
I wouldn't do what you did but if you were doing any kind of intelectually demanding work it would be astonishing if you didn't learn more than people working 40 hours a week do. Double the hours is unlikely to lead to double the learning but 1.2x? 1.5x? Perhaps as an upper bound 1.7x?
However, the law of diminishing returns definitely applied and my energy reserves were depleted within a few months, never having a chance to recharge. I recall towards the end I would catch myself sometimes just staring at the monitor for an hour or more, doing nothing. I also think this was a one-time shot for me—I lost something I can't get back and wouldn't have it in me to do this again.
In some video games you can deplete stamina, but permanent debuffs can drain max stamina. I like to think of it as the first happening, then eventually the latter.
e.g. doctors become good at their jobs after their schooling by seeing as many patients as possible / doing as many procedures
This becomes less important once you become proficient / put in your 10,000 hours.
Also, right now I'm struggling to hit 40 hours a week, I wonder if I'll ever feel up to working those crazy hours again.
You described the problem yourself: given enough people making a particular choice, it becomes necessity for others. See two-income trap, for example.
So basically, it's okay for you as long as you're not a minority. Of course, it's better to be healthy and wealthy than to be sick and poor.
Some people can run 100m in sub 10 seconds. It's rare. Some people can work very long hours with high productivity. It's annoying for the rest of us, but that doesn't make it false.
(I definitely wouldn't recommend doing this working for someone else than oneself, or expecting anyone else than oneself to do it. And then not talking about it, so the others in your company don't know, and feel no such pressure)
Leisure, in the original sense (see Josef Pieper), is also necessary and increasing drowned out by work and recreation. All of these are good things, but they have their place.
I once saw an interview of a British trade union leader reply to a BBC journalist about his anger with immigrants. He said unions had battled for decades to work saner hours, to have time for football, to spend time with their friends and families, and for children to not work. They had got all this codified into law and labor practices, and now the immigrants were upending all this work by skirting laws and acceptable work practices
We should optimise for productivity + life outside of work instead
I'm glad the "I work XX hours per week" bench is slowly dying out - fools gold.
I think we should stop caring about how others spend their time.
The problem arises, however, when overworking (or bragging about overworking) becomes part of the culture within a company
> "The sleep deprivation, the treatment by senior bankers, the mental and physical stress… I've been through foster care and this is arguably worse," one respondent said in the survey, which has been seen by the BBC.
Seems like a lot more than just a culture of work going on there.
Working long hours and bragging about overtime is not uncommon in a lot of blue collar work too (maybe moreso). People can earn really good money working a lot of overtime, and it's great they can choose to do that. If a lot of people have the same mindset or it turns a bit competitive, there is nothing inherently wrong with that either. It is not at all the same thing as people being threatened by management or bullied by coworkers for refusing unreasonable working conditions.
Says who? If you want to work 40 hours a week, have your weekends off, and relax more, that's great. You are optimizing for more time off than me as you value it more than I do; cool. However, if I want to work more than 40 hours a week and my total output ends up being higher than yours then I should absolutely be rewarded by my company for it. All things being equal, I should promote faster; I should get better raises; etc. You are optimizing for one thing, I am optimizing for another, and that should be fine.
personally i don't mind if you prefer to work more hours, but i'll be watching your performance. if it doesn't scale with the number of hours you put in then you'll have to cut down. also if i get any complaints from anyone else in the team. i can't have your performance demoralizing everyone else, because in the end it is the performance of the whole team that matters. i also won't be giving you extra opportunities for promotion or raises, because that would be unfair to others who can't work as much as you. again, doing so would be demoralizing for everyone else.
case in point, there is a company where anyone working more than 20 hours a week got reduced pay for those extra hours.
what company and in what country? that's a compelling idea, provided the pay is decent enough that one would only need to work 20hrs a week.
they were featured on hackernews early this year:
Definitely agree about the culture, though. The Mac group loved what they were doing, but that was not a healthy or sustainable way of working.
Team: "What are we accelerating to meet?" PM: "Just because, do I need to talk to your manager?" Team: ... PM: goes home at normal hours
>>Water bottles, hats, shirts.
Or worse. 'Recognition'. A piece of paper on which they write your name, call it a certificate and give it to you when the team claps for you. Fast forward 5 years, most of your colleagues from back, who moved on, don't even remember your name.
There is no dearth of people who go great extents working insane hours for things like 'appreciation emails' and 'recognition certificates'.
However, I am in a position now where I can work 80 hours one week and disappear for a while to balance it out.
I try to make the most of the "flexible work schedule" and "unlimited time off" without shortchanging my employer, and I am grateful that they trust their employees enough to allow me to do so.
But as a programmer, even 40h/week is unrealistic.
I only get somewhere between 2-5 hours of real work done per day (as a freelance dev). Depending of where I am in the week. Mondays are great because I'm well-rested, but by Friday, I'm less able to put long hours.
Anyone has an idea why it's expected that programmers work similar shifts as less creative/deep jobs?
[1] https://bebusinessed.com/history/history-40-hour-workweek/
Edit: I avoid doing pretty much any kind of work on Sundays. And Saturdays are a mix of work and play.
I can't edit my post now, but thanks for the correction.
However, I'm not very invested in my work, and I genuinely wish I could work in a team with such esprit de corps and shared sense of purpose as the original Mac team.
I wonder if the two can only ever be had as a package deal.
I.e. if you are so invested in your work (probably a good thing, all else being equal), does it inevitably end up expanding beyond 40h/week (probably a bad thing, all else being equal)?
I currently avg. 90hrs a week at 1/3 the pay than my last one that scored better X times on many metrics.
However, although quite draining from many aspects, I enjoy it more and am kinda more happier.