"Any time you have worked long hours, it is a sign of a broken process."
programmers.stackexchange.com
programmers.stackexchange.com
Enterprise: Incompetent management, lazy co-workers, and spoiled users.
Small Business: Tough competition and limited resources.
Startup: Taking advantage of opportunites that may not pass this way again.
He's making the point that regular long hours are always a sign of bad management.
I'd tend to agree. Any business can be run in balance with a reasonable lifestyle. If you're working overtime very often on your own business, it's either because you're incompetent, or lazy, or greedy, or failing (see 'incompetent'). If you're working regular long hours on someone else's business, it's because they are incompetent/lazy/greedy.
Of all of the successful people I've met (measured in cash, influence, etc), I can't think of ANY who weren't pretty seriously married to their work. I guess many of those people fall into the "greedy" camp and are doing it for the money. But I think most of them do it because they love (or are just addicted to) the game they are playing.
Whoever you're competing with, you've probably got competitors smarter than you and willing to put in long hours. If you're playing to win (many people do, for a lot of reasons), how do you propose to beat them?
To anticipate a common argument: Yes, working hard can lead to stress/bad decisions/burnout. But empirically, it seems to correlate pretty strongly with success.
I'm not convinced that regular long hours lead to a more competitive business. Particularly when it comes to running a business (as opposed to being a contractor or freelancer, which is a completely different proposition), spending 1 hour sitting outside and having a great idea that saves you a day of work is much more valuable than spending 16 hours getting it done the stupid way.
Generally, I haven't seen a great correlation between working long hours and working smart - but I have seen a good correlation between working smart and being successful.
Another anecdotal bit of evidence: generally, most of the successful workaholics I've met tend to be in the corporate world, where they often don't have the choice of working smart.
Now, though, I work my ass off at my day job, I spend a couple hours a night and the weekends working on my startup, and I spend as much time as I possibly can with my girlfriend. I'm a much happier person, and I'm still making tons of progress in life in general.
Say we fork the universe now and one version of you works 25 hour weeks henceforth, which the other works 50 hours per week henceforth. Who retires with more money and more impact on the world? Both version of you are equally smart. The well-rested you might make SLIGHTLY smarter decisions due to happiness/lack of fatigue perhaps... But surely you wouldn't contend that the success outcomes (professional impact and wealth, for the sake of argument) wouldn't be different.
It's not a myth-- working hard correlates with success (plenty of studies out there to back it up). Working smart correlates with success too... Though one of the things that really surprised me about being in Y Combinator was that the founders WEREN'T universally brilliant/clever. They DID universally work their asses off and generally had irrational stick-with-it-ness.
Happiness is a whole different discussion, of course. Whether "top 1%" success is even worth it is another discussion.
If I forked my life into a version of me that worked 50 hour work weeks and one that worked 75 hour work weeks, the 50-hour me would win, hands down. The 75 hour work week me would outright miss most of the key strategic decisions that got me where I am. When I look at everything I've done that in hindsight has been a huge career boost - getting involved in the Harry Potter fandom, making friends on the C2 Wiki that got me a job in financial software, learning Lisp & functional programming, founding a startup, and getting a job at Google - they all happened in the downtime between work. Had I simply worked 75 hour work weeks since 2001, I would be a physics grad student right now, hating it, and making a pittance. I'd probably be a damned good physics grad student, but that doesn't help me very much.
Now, I also put in quite a few hours into developing skills and building a track record, and I don't think those opportunities would've opened up if I hadn't. But I wouldn't have thought to look for the opportunities if I did nothing but concentrate on work. You're a big fan of necessary but not sufficient conditions, right? The work is necessary, but so is the downtime.
Even if you didn't assume that, there is still an underlying assumption that working harder and getting more more money will in the long run make you happier than working shorter hours and having less.
If you con me into working 75 hours a week for 70k, I'll burn out when I realize I've been wasting my time propping up a loser.
I'd imagine most people are the same. Pay them enough, and they will cope with terrible conditions. Con them, and they will lose interest a lot faster.
It's hard to tell. Would I work better and smarter knowing that I only have a slim 5 hours a day to get stuff done? I think it may have more positive effects than you think - particularly if the rest of the time was doing things that will restore my energy (e.g. cultural activities, meeting people, sports, relaxing...)
Sure, YC encourages a kind of work-work-work attitude, and I'm not suggesting this necessarily will hurt you - in fact, because every YC founder is basically completely incompetent (at the beginning) and thrown into a maelstrom of challenges, it's not that surprising that there's a culture of working long hours to make up for lack of initial competence. But to suggest that somehow the eventual success comes because of the long hours (rather than because of the connections and wisdoms imparted by YC, as well as the fact that all or most YC founders are very smart) seems a bit confused to me...
However, there is evidence to suggest an inverse relationship may exist. Furthermore, hazing is effective in building solidarity, and people are generally more likely to retroactively justify hardship, which makes me think there may be a psychological bias towards overvaluing poor work/life balance.
In my particular line of work, Daniel Cook put it better than I ever could: http://www.lostgarden.com/2008/09/rules-of-productivity-pres...
"However, there is evidence to suggest an inverse relationship may exist."
So you'd bet that if I shadowed 1,000 self-made millionaires while they were building their businesses, and then shadowed a random sampling of (employed) Americans, the millionaires would work LESS than average? Really?
FWIW, I do agree that specialized knowledge work doesn't benefit from tons of hours... As someone pointed out in another comment, entrepreneurial success generally requires a wide variety of different tasks.
No, I never said anything of the like. In fact, I said that the qualities more likely to make you successful are also likely to predict working long hours. What I would say is that if you could make two copies of the world, one where entrepreneurs work reasonable hours and one where they work extensive hours, they would generally have better outcomes with the former.
In essence, it seems that working in crunch mode for extended periods of time is a bad habit of highly motivated people.
"Entrepreneurial success generally requires a wide variety of different tasks."
Obviously, there are all sorts of businesses and all sorts of entrepreneurs, but I'm not sure that the data available suggests that working with varied tasks alleviates problems of fatigue. Additionally, the penalties of multitasking are generally well documented. If the tasks just need to be completed and are straight-forward, or if you're in a short lead-up to a deadline, certainly there are times when it makes sense to work extended hours.
On the more competitive business part, on average a developer only has about 3-4 peak hours of productivity during any given day. The time when your programming in the "zone" and get huge amounts of work done in minimal periods of time. The remaining time tends to be filler time, minor code cleanup, changes, being stuck on problems you would never encounter when still fresh/awake. etc.
When you increase work hours across the board you increasing this filler time of not especially high productivity work. At the same time you tend to decrease the amount of peak productivity/in the zone hours developers see each day due to the gradual effects of burn out.
It's not good for business.I find swombat's generalization incredibly insulting and naive. I've heard from many successful business founders that they often have no choice but to work long hours at the start. I know swombat is talking about regular long hours, but what is his definition of regular? There are always exceptions to the rule.
I don't have a lot of respect for people who make overly-general statements in absolutes. I have even less respect for those who feel the need to back up their statement by characterizing anyone who disagrees as incompetent, greedy, or otherwise.
I agree that in an established business, you shouldn't need to work 10 hours a day everyday. I'm very much for people having a balanced life, and for treating employees fairly. However, depending on the situation, there may be periods where you do need to work long hours. There are no golden rules in life that you can follow and be guaranteed success, no matter how smart you are. Everyone makes mistakes, and a failure doesn't mean you are incompetent.
Say what you want about the drive and determination of a bunch of 19-year-olds going through YC, but what they are not is competent. In fact, almost anyone, no matter their age and experience, is utterly incompetent at running their own business when they first get started.
I think your problem is that you're taking "incompetent" as a personal insult (not sure why you're doing that..) when it's meant as a statement of fact. I was certainly utterly incompetent when I started my first two businesses - and in fact I am still somewhat incompetent, as exemplified by the fact that I do need to work evenings and weekends every once in a while.
But even with that clarified, I'll still disagree. The first 3-6 months of starting a business often involves a lot of busy work. This is not coding or otherwise requiring of immense thought, but it does take time. A great many business owners have said that it requires long hours to get a business up and running.
Of course, that does not apply to regular employees. Nor should it remain constant after you've started. Even so, heads of companies often do spend longer hours working than most. That's not to say their lives are unbalanced. Let me quote Bill Gates:
http://money.cnn.com/2006/03/30/news/newsmakers/gates_howiwo...
* It's a nice luxury to get some time to go write up my thoughts or follow up on meetings during the day. But sometimes that doesn't happen. So then it's great after the kids go to bed to be able to just sit at home and go through whatever e-mail I didn't get to. If the entire week is very busy, it's the weekend when I'll send the long, thoughtful pieces of e-mail. When people come in Monday morning, they'll see that I've been quite busy— they'll have a lot of e-mail.*
Working long hours is not always a sign of incompetence or lack of process. It still depends on the situation, and what you do in those hours. I do agree with a weaker statement, it shouldn't be that the majority of your employees always have to work long hours.
Of course, as Gordon Gecko would say, "it's never been about the money -- it's about the game."
The people I know who are highly successful work hard, and they take their work seriously. But they don't let their work consume them. There is still time for hobbies, passions, and human relationships once all the code has been written.
Continuous improvement, seeking out things you're doing wrong and fixing them, and generally paying attention to what you're doing and why you're doing it tend to trump raw hours any day.
The only ones I know who are slightly less well-rounded but still successful, as I mentioned in another comment, are the corporate successful types - imho because they have less of a choice about how to manage their time.
Of course it's incompetent to cling to an unprofitable undertaking, but there are valid reasons for working overtime over an extended period.
Until something gets off the ground, I wouldn't say working long hours doesn't make you lazy, greedy, incompetent or stupid. That said, it can certainly be counter-productive if done for too long.
Add to that the machismo notions that working long hours is working "harder" than otherwise and that working fewer hours shows less commitment and less strength. In reality it takes more focus, more smarts, and more discipline to work shorter hours effectively (sure, you can slack off by working fewer hours, but you can also slack off by working more hours too)
So when companies come to an I-banking firm, they're usually like "I need all your best people on this, stat." And because there're millions of dollars at stake, the I-banking firm will happily comply.
So I-bankers definitely fall into the "working late because of somebody else's incompetence" camp. In this case, it's customers. There're various things that startups could do that would make I-banker's jobs a lot easier: keep good accounting records, make sure they're completely covered legally, have solid revenue streams, don't get all buddy-buddy with potential acquirers. But startups that do all this rarely need an I-banker to close the deal; they just negotiate directly with a potential acquirer, have the lawyers draw up a deal, and sign it.
Basically, the I-banking business model is trading other people's stupidity for cash. It's the same thing with management consultants, and divorce attorneys, and litigators, all also professions that can make a lot of money but have shitty quality of life.
Personal Project: Mental illness.
Family: Organized crime.
Farm: Harvest time.
Anime: Watching Neon Genesis Evangelion.
Reason #1 is that working long hours often becomes an excuse to not prioritize properly. Working under realistic constraints forces you to really decide whether some feature is worth it, or if spending 40 hours on Feature A is better than spending 40 hours in Features B, C, and D combined. Too often the answer at companies is, "Well, A, B, C, and D are all really important, so just work harder and do everything." That's a very seductive trap to fall into, but it's absolutely the wrong escape valve. At least in my view a failure to focus and prioritize properly is far more often a cause of failure for startups than "we didn't work hard enough."
Reason #2 is that you want to avoid burning people out if you expect to be around for the long haul. Our company just turned 10, and we still have a surprising number of long-tenured engineers, which I'd attribute in large part to the work environment and the relative sanity of the work/life balance people can have. If you expect people to work 60+ hours a week every week, they're not going to stick around for 10 years; they're going to get burned out and bored and they'll feel like the only way to get a break is to quit.
You can quibble with the second reason, but I think that even in a situation where you feel like you have to get a ton done and working 40 hours a week isn't an option, it's very important not to use "we'll just work harder" as an excuse to avoid making the hard decisions around priorities.
I don't think some m-f, 9-5 union type situation is the proper answer, but theres gotta be a better way. Sitting at my desk when I'm not being productive is a waste of my life.
I've recently got into pomodoro timing. I set the timer for 45 minutes, focus totally on work, then take a fifteenish-minute break. I can't do it all day though.
I know the classic pomodoro technique is supposed to be 25 minutes on, 5 minutes off, but a five minute break is too short for me (I like to get out of the building) and the rhythm of the half-hours just goes by too quickly. 45 minute serious-work periods work much better for me.
Many times when I have worked long hours, it was because I was really into the problem I was trying to solve, and didn't want to quit.
Rare spats of long hours due to abnormal events is not an issue
But yeah, I appreciate the sentiment that no-one should be allowed to pillage their workers' evenings and weekends simply because they don't want to tell their boss "I promised something I couldn't deliver."
I DO think that's a valid separation.
For other jobs, like being a big firm lawyer, long hours are kind of baked in: You get paid a salary (a big one), the company you work for bills you out by the hour, person with the highest billables doesn't get fired. That's probably not likely to change, it's not a process problem per se, and I suspect there's plenty other jobs generally like that.
I often like to hang around the office to take care of personal business-but-not-work stuff between 6 and 7 pm. Things like personal finance, doing accounting for this one volunteer organization (I'm treasurer), browsing and booking personal travel. I never want to do that stuff once I'm at home, so putting that into the 6-7 pm window both lowers temptation to do it during the business workday and pushes out an urge to keep working on work stuff late.
I know at my rates, if I work 14 hour days, my productivity shoots down, and I blow the face and upper body off the budget in no time. I tell people this, but they still want it sometimes. But really, it's usually better to cut expectations and go at a measured pace all the time.
I know at my rates, if I work 14 hour days, my productivity shoots down, and I blow the face and upper body off the budget in no time.
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I see the point they're trying to make, but this is the problem with speaking in absolutes ...
My personal preference (and I suspect other developers do this too, but I could be very wrong about that) is to work when I'm in the zone ... sometimes I can go for 8 hours, others I can go 24 hours straight without any trouble (other times I don't get anything done for a couple of days) ... during projects when I'm knee deep in building something, its not uncommon for me to do 10 - 14 hour days ... not because its expected of me, but because that's how I work.
As long your employer isn't forcing you to do death marches/ insisting you work on weekends and you're getting good rest, exercise and eating well, I don't see a problem.
I've been through this very same ringer recently and strongly believe that changing from within is far more trouble, far more stressful and far more difficult than the effort is worth.
If you've got so many options, leave.
I've very happy in my new role and it took getting out of the old one to fix it.
I am not referring to "crunch time" where you realize everything is broken and your schedule was unrealistic; rather, many projects I have participated in have an escalating work load as you near release, because a lot of the work simply cannot be done before previous stages are completed.
Unless you are a large entity that can heavily "pipeline" by running 10 or 20 projects at once, and shuffle people around as a project's workload changes, to avoid ever working overtime you'd need to either have to hire too many employees, or hire/fire regularly. Not entirely dissimilar to trying to balance a server cluster with load spikes.
What part of that do you think is NOT broken?
About all I can think of is over-hiring, or release cycles could be extended, but for us TTM is pretty sensitive.
I'm not personally a fan of long hours, but not everyone can work for a LinkedIn. And in many shops, long hours are unavoidable regardless of how much well-intentioned process is in place.
And software engineers' acquiescence to being abused like that ensures that it will continue.
That being said, its symptomatic. I've been places where the hours were modest and lots got done, and places where the hours were insane and nothing got done.
So the title (and the point the OP makes) don't really hold up. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that if you can't get done what you need to get done during nominal work hourse, then one possibility is that your process is broken. Of course that isn't as impactful :-)
This is one of the reasons I hate working for other people. If I'm going to be wasting my youth away for something, I'm going to be getting all or the majority of the profits.
"All questions on Stack Exchange are expected to be objective and have concrete answers; we’re not a place for conversation, opinions, or socializing. We also expect questions to represent real problems, not just imponderables, hypotheticals, or requests for opinions."
I'm a huge fan of SE, I just find the random prickyness of shutting stuff down without editing annoying.
Thought experiment: Imagine some sort of truce declared among startups to skip this part of the arms race. Or, imagine a law passed capping work weeks for software engineers at 50 hours, no exceptions (again, the reason this happening by law would be to eliminate the arms race). What would it do?
Why would anyone hire a dude like this with such poor reasoning skills?
Sometimes, I prefer to work 18 hours in one day and enjoy 2 days free, rather than 9 to 5 it for 3-4 days. At this point, you're insulting my personal preferences, not my process.
I don't know how many hours Braids creator worked, but I have a feeling that it was a lot less than a deathmarch.
I hate absolute statements like these. Some of my best works have come from working long hours voluntarily.
"Any time you have worked long hours, it is a sign of a broken process."
This is a such a horrible generalization. Successful people always work hard/long hours to make something succeed. Imagine telling your kids that to be successful you should work just 40 hours and no more. They will be easily steamed rolled by other kids that are willing to work harder/ go the extra mile.
Here is a relevant piece from: http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html
>>Now for the matter of drive. You observe that most great scientists have tremendous drive. I worked for ten years with John Tukey at Bell Labs. He had tremendous drive. One day about three or four years after I joined, I discovered that John Tukey was slightly younger than I was. John was a genius and I clearly was not. Well I went storming into Bode's office and said, ``How can anybody my age know as much as John Tukey does?'' He leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head, grinned slightly, and said, ``You would be surprised Hamming, how much you would know if you worked as hard as he did that many years.'' I simply slunk out of the office!<<
>>What Bode was saying was this: ``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. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity - it is very much like compound interest. I don't want to give you a rate, but it is a very high rate. Given two people with exactly the same ability, the one person who manages day in and day out to get in one more hour of thinking will be tremendously more productive over a lifetime. I took Bode's remark to heart; I spent a good deal more of my time for some years trying to work a bit harder and I found, in fact, I could get more work done. I don't like to say it in front of my wife, but I did sort of neglect her sometimes; I needed to study. You have to neglect things if you intend to get what you want done. There's no question about this.<<
Yes, sometimes it may mean that working long hours there is something wrong and the title should reflect that rather than just generalizing.
I remember there was a study done at one point that the best piano players had worked longer hours per week practicing as opposed to the so so piano player.
You want to work 40 hours and be happy? Good! But I doubt you will be able to achieve greatness like that. Achieving success requires sacrifices.
Edison is another example of a guy that would work really long hours. Look at everything that he accomplished. You want to be mediocre, work 40 hours. You want to be great like Edison, work your ass off. Don't listen to the little people that tell you not to work your ass off. That is the road to mediocrity.
Now, if you are saying that you want to have time for family and be another cog in the machine, 40 hours are great for you. </rant>
edit - OK, after further reflection I think that what the title means is that IF you are just a cog in the machine of a large corporation AND you are working long hours then something is terribly wrong. If that was the original intent then I completely agree. Is OK to do it once in a while but if it is normal then something is terribly wrong.
Now, for academics, athletics, other competitive fields and even startups at least in their earlier faces you still have to work long hours or the other guys will steam roll you. Eventually though you do hit a point of diminishing returns so you have to watch for that.
I doubt you should ever use Edison or Einstein to ever refer to the average person. Let alone put yourself in the same camp, you'll probably do yourself mental harm via exhaustion. Fine if you have abnormal drive and intelligence go for it.
But chances are you are an average person and need to obey the rules of what makes average people happy. Or you won't be happy. Maybe you'll throw yourself at your work in the hope of finding happiness.. something I'll admit to doing myself.. chasing dreams of a better life.
Theres plenty of research that states the exact opposite of what you are saying, enough that France even had laws banning working over 35 hours (and its 48 hours for the rest of Europe). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time#Western_Europe
What works for some people doesn't work for others. I remember listening to my friend talk about working in Japan during the late 80's early 90's and described the people he worked with as having an ingrained apathy towards the long work day, and most just mucked around all day. Took 2 hours to even start work, the work force was extremely unproductive for the hours they where doing. I'm sure theres different stories in different industries but thats a story I take as 100% as the person isn't known for being a liar or exaggerator.
Just because you can make people work long hours doesn't mean things get better, it often means things get worse. And thats the moral of his story about Japan.
The stories of how industrious and loyal they are... just stories... they are just people like everyone else. And as a majority they'd rather be at home with there families and friends than at work making someone else rich.
I believe that people can only work productively for a set amount per day and keeping people at work after that doesn't lead to any more work being done.
Its always the exceptional guy who is going to win the prize any day. And that is why people always run into exceptionally productive people and don't find it easy to compete with them. Multiply this with the drive and energy which keeps them productive over time and suddenly things get very difficult.
For most people 5 hours of productive work will see them by, but you should not expect that to be sufficient to be the best or to be sufficient enough to beat the best. For that you will have to do something extra.
I could show you many more but why?
>>But chances are you are an average person and need to obey the rules of what makes average people happy
Yes, do what makes you happy and yes I am an average person but that doesn't mean that I cannot tell you that the sky is blue even if I were blind (I think you know what I mean). What I disliked is the blanket statement. In very competitive fields if you want to be top dog you have to work long hours and even that may not be enough. Of course, if you work on a sweatshop working long hours really makes no difference. Top dog against who? Lets just not make blanket statements.
Some people are happy working 40 hours others are happy working 80 hours. And if you are in a competitive field 40 hours will not do the job. Happiness is besides the point. If that doesn't make you happy don't do it. I'm not telling anybody to work 80 hours to be happy. I'm telling you not to try to convince other people that they should not work 80 hours a week because you don't like to work 80 hours a week.
I'm saying that if you want to stay ahead of your peers, say, athletics, academics, you better train more, study harder than the other guy. Is almost a self evident truth so I don't understand what we are arguing about. If I'm wrong please enlighten me.
But as a matter for fact we need to define the term 'Happiness', a lot of people measure happiness by how much minimum they can achieve(Which makes them happy) with how much minimum effort they put. For example, if you put in 5 productive hours of work a day and end up achieving a, what you describe as a happy life, you would consider that success.
But a lot of people tend to measure success in a different way. For example, Even though during atleast two days in a week I might have opportunity to go back early. I purposefully use the free time to check if I can do some extra work which will give an edge to my career. Generally its something like this, I check if I can add some feature that has a direct impact on revenue or some bug that I can fix or something I can read upon which will help me take more informed decisions later.
I was not a very brilliant kid in the school, nor in college nor during my engineering. In fact I was almost on border, but I would always make it. How? By multiplying effort over time. Most of my friends back in school when I meet them today, find it astonishing that I have made it so big in the industry, while even many high scoring folks haven't.
At work my philosophy is very simple, Seize every work opportunity as it comes. Ensure you multiply effort with time. Thereby, completely hedging for my low IQ by sheer work alone. Indeed as they say opportunity multiplies as you seize it. I also see a lot of high scoring people straight out of college who don't do it big in the industry. Because intelligent people expect, brilliance will make up for everything. But the fact is, Intelligence only acts as a catalyst in the path to success. The bulk of everything else is sheer hard work.
Apart from this its important to understand things like management. Especially time management. Its important to plan, review and track your life time, decade, yearly , monthly and weekly goals. Measuring your productivity is important. Reviewing it constantly, and course correction is the key.
The great thing is today you can achieve anything by sheer work. This gives me great hope for the future.
And hence in a sense chasing someone else's dream and not so much your own, and even worse putter a wager on the return of that extra effort.
If you're doing the work in a situation where adding staff or changing commitments really will not help you, by all means, continue to work, and find whatever tricks you need to stay focused in that time.
Edison had a whole company helping him do his work, and I bet the best of piano players have a cleaning lady, a chauffeur, and a specialist in tuning pianos all helping them to spend more time mentally preparing (including via sleep) and with hands on keys.
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertai...
The link claims that one of the best violinists in the world would practice 7 hours a day. The complete opposite of what you are citing.
From the link:
>>Such dedication is also apparent in musicians. Maxim Vengerov, 34, is one of the world’s greatest violinists. He was born in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk and, after being given a miniature fiddle at the age of four, displayed outstanding aptitude.
His talent was matched by an immense work ethic. He practised seven hours a day, giving his first recital at the age of five and winning his first international prize at 15. Vengerov said: “My mother would get home at 8pm, cook dinner and then teach me the violin until four in the morning. As a four-year-old boy it was torture. But I became a violinist within two years.”
<<
Also, different professions probably have different definitions of long hours. Four hours practicing on the violin must be pretty exhausting since it is a physical exercise. Therefore you must also take that into account. Four hours playing the violin and four hours programming are not the same thing. Four hours for a violin player is already long hours. Four hours for a programmer sitting in front of a computer is nothing. Specially if you are debugging code, you could easily spend more than 24 hours debugging a problem, I doubt a violinist could do the same.
Another example is marathon runners. Running two hours everyday is already long hours. You cannot equate two hours running a marathon with two hours of programming right.
So my point still stands, you have to put in long hours. The definition of long hours changes by profession.
An easier way to see it is that you have to put in more hours than what your average peer puts in. Of course, you also have to do it smart.
-Edit This is a tangent but I just thought of this and seems important enough to share. Even though the runner and the violinists are practicing they are not really being productive because they are not producing anything that the world can use. A programmer in the same amount of time is being productive because he is actually generating things that can be used by the world.
Edison approach takes time, a lot of work and thereby you need to find ways of being more productive. Both methods have their plus'es and minus'es.
But.. If you find some body very hardworking, going over the counter to put effort in his work to achieve something and he ends up being more successfully than everybody else. That shouldn't look surprising. And that precisely what happened with Edison and Tesla.
Although Edison lost the war of currents, but comparing their lives as a whole Edison ended up achieving far more than Tesla.
It really confuses to see kids with red bulls typing code all day and night. I mean, how can you think clear and be productive that way ?
You may do more, but do you do it better and deliver quality code ?
Those kids are learning and will probably make a success of what they are doing. The payoff comes later.
On further reading I'm pretty sure I'm not, but perhaps the very triviality of the problem confuses people enough that they have difficulty with it. ("Is there some weird edge case I'm not considering?")
The other big question with FizzBuzz is whether it's worth making your code more complicated in order to make it slightly shorter. That is, do you start off with a "if i % 15 == 0" or not? My inclination is yes, because I'd rather have ten lines that obviously work than eight lines that might not.
That's the only reason I work long hours.
Secondly, most who work in Wall Street will tell you it's not about the process. It's about the culture. People don't work until 7 or 8 because they're fixing bugs, or because development is so slow. It's because they're expected to and if they get up and leave at 5, it leaves a bad impression on management and their co-workers.
Even if we stretched the 48 hours to 48 days, I am pretty sure this has never happened.
Reddit having to work crazy to take up the exodus from Digg.
That bookmark service that did great out of the del.ici.ous fiasco (sorry I honestly can't remember your name!).
Perpetuum having a mass of new players because of the Eve monocle incident.
I'm sure others can think of times when one business has had to react rapidly to either manoeuvres or failures of another business.
Not quite put out of business, but massive opportunity cost if the reaction is not made.
trunk.ly? They certainly weren't the only ones but were in the right place at the right time to attract a heap of users and as a consequence did some crazy weeks to bring forward a heap of planned features to keep the newly attracted users.
Ah, like the PlayStation Network security debacle.
However, I'd like to make a few points.
regression tests should be baked in from the start, especially easy at a startup starting from fresh.
Features that can be implemented in 48 hours have no business being in the way of your success.
Mission critical bugs are a symptom of a broken process. They happen, but shouldn't be pathological.
Yes, and that culture stinks. Luckily for software developers at this point in time we have MANY options and don't have to be subject to shitty working conditions.
And what difference does it make to call it a cultural thing? People are still getting their heads injured.
Constantly changing requirements are exactly why you want tests. Not only do they help you find regression bugs when requirements change, but they help tremendously in writing code that is easy to maintain. If you can't test a piece of code, it's a red flag that you can't easily change it either.
Furthermore, I don't buy the notion that writing test code adds significant time to the development process. I do not have metrics, but I would argue that a good test suite actually reduces total development time, since the time writing tests is more than offset by the time saved testing manually and fixing bugs later.
As for Wall Street, they do many amazing things sure but I'd hope that the WS culture is not the one we're all aspiring towards.
What if you were performing surgery in an environment where you couldn't afford to sterilize every single instrument?