What do long hours often represent?
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.
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.
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