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Comment by johngalt | Hacker News Reader

Sounds like he's made the right decision. It's important to have balance in your life. However, I don't want to hear him cry "ageism!" when that young kid that's doing 80hour weeks gets promoted ahead of him. It's important to make these kinds of sacrifices when you have a family, but you should also understand that they are your sacrifices.

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Sounds like you're measuring input rather than output, an all too common failure of software development management. There's a rather good chance the experienced pro with a life is several more times efficient than the "young kid"; I certainly know that e.g. after 20+ years of programming my skill at debugging became almost frightening. Or after 15 years how low my error rate became and how good my designs were (best metric: accommodating totally unanticipated requirements).

You completely missed one of the points of the story:

By doing this I’ve actually discovered that I can be more productive when I get away from the code for a while

I wish more people in IT would realise that software isn't like digging ditches. Another hour of work, after a certain point, does not necessarily translate into an hour of productivity.

To be honest that makes the article a lot less interesting. So... you spend more time with your family _and_ you're more productive? Yay!

Glad you realise something subtle here. It's not so obvious.

I hope the guy working 80 hour weeks was not promoted into a management job. He doesn't sound particularly efficient.

efficiency = output / input

you can't measure efficiency by only looking at time spent. if the 80 hr a week guy produces twice as much as the 40 hour a week guy, their efficiency is the same. if the 80 hr a week guy produces 3 times as much, his efficiency is 50% higher

Software engineers aren't making widgets, and its hard to measure output quantitatively. I can assure you that your ability to make good decisions isn't as good after 18 hours of working as it is during the first 6. In engineering, good decision making can save you tons of time in the long run.

But the assumption that an the very same guy produces twice the amount in twice the amount can't obviously be true in any job that requires mental exertion.

I get what you're saying. Though more is not necessarily better, I have no doubt that someone with abilities similar to myself without a family could put in more effective hours and outperform me.

Like so many things in engineering, I have analyzed the situation and made the tradeoffs that i think provide the best solution to my particular situation.

That's exactly what I meant. The responses to my comment I mostly agree with. Diminshing returns are true, but businesses pay attention to total output, not per-hour output. To say a childless workaholic with no interruptions will somehow accomplish less in 80hours than a family man will in 40hours is just not accurate. If you were a woman complaining about a pay gap, people wouldn't hesitate to point this out.

It is a sacrifice, but I consider it the right one. That the choice costs something only shows how seriously we take it. I'm just trying to add some perspective for those with an odd definition of "fairness".

The arguments about mature programmers being more efficient with less time are a red herring. The point is, given this guy working 40 hours a week and an equally mature (presumably childless) programmer working say 70 hours a week, I'd go with the second one. It's just that there aren't a lot of the second to go around.

Its interesting that we've managed to build a society where people consider it normal that the most fundamental activity possible for maintaining that society requires potentially sacrificing position and status.

As a thought experiment, try explaining the above post to a 13th century feudal Lord.

From what I've read, feudal lords normally focused on affairs of state and carousing and let trusted servants tend to their heirs until they were ready to start learning their roles, while peasants mostly treated their kids as unpaid farmhands. Even a couple of generations ago people wrote of growing up with a distant parent and mostly spent time with other kids. Parenthood as the main focal point and time commitment for the lives of most adults seems pretty recent, and I worry that people may be neglecting the unique ideas they're called to create in favor of largely doing the same things everyone else is.

experience can do in 40 hours what younger, inexperienced can do in 80. As you build your tool chest, things become faster and less mistake prone.

Except that it's often more like 80 minutes vs. 80 hours, or the inexperienced---although it's more often the less ... skilled---simply can't solve the problem at all. In my other comment I mentioned debugging; my ability to recognize the ... pattern/smell/whatever of a bug will often let me heuristically narrow the search to an amazing degree. What once would take me hours or days became minutes.

You're just a whole bucket full of humble aren't you :-)

Heh, indeed.

But just as it's unbecoming to boast about what you are not, one needs to recognize what one is and can do to arrange that things work out best, at least in startups where that vs. e.g. politics determines personal and project/corporate success. The flip side of the theme of the 2nd Dirty Harry movie, "A man's got to know his own limitations."

Plus I think I'm allowed to be proud of what I've accomplished over decades of hard work. I started with punched card FORTRAN "IV" on the IBM 1130 in high school in the fall of 1977 (scare quotes because it was closer to a FORTRAN II, e.g. no logical IFs), that prompted me to begin a lifelong independent study of software engineering (since I realized there had to be better ways to do this) and the cited level of skill in debugging nasty C programs was achieved by 1999, a full 22 years later. One would really hope one has learned a thing or two over a couple of decades.

This is great, but you have to have a manager that looks beyond how all the idiots are working so much 'harder'.

Aye, there's the rub.

This is true. So many managers see somebody doing such hard work, fixing so many bugs, that they think he must be the brightest engineer. They never think about the fact that the engineer must have created all those bugs in the first place.

This is the saddest comment I've ever read on HN.

Randite. Surprised?

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