A contrarian take on working long hours
allisonpickens.substack.com
allisonpickens.substack.com
Working for over a decade in silicon valley, I have yet to come across a company or group where the majority opinion has been that people must work more than 8 hours a day to succeed. I'm not sure if there ever was a time when overworking was a norm in the industry, but it definitely has not been the case for a while.
Heck multiple companies, including Amazon, are starting to experiment with 4 day work weeks. If you are in a position where you must justify (to yourself, management, or the public) a regular work schedule, save your energy and just quit.
I've absolutely worked at companies where this was either understood but not spoken or was clearly espoused by leadership. I don't think it's rare at all, at least within a certain crowd of successful companies.
Those companies that are experimenting with work schedules are also trying to squeeze more out of their employees... just in a different way. They may recognize that causing employees to burn-out is a problem and are looking for ways to optimize the employee output.
It isn't necessarily a bad thing to optimize for employees generating better output. It's only bad when employee morale is completely ignored.
I recently left a company where I led a team in building a high quality and very complex product but the job felt super easy.
Now at my new gig I'm managing a new team where the product is garbage and the team is very junior. Neither of these are the cause of my overwhelming workload as the ultimate product is very low complexity. It is instead the horrible alignment of various personalities that results in an inconceivable amount of meetings and daily shifting priorities.
My day blends a lot more, as I have periods of work and periods of "life". Instead of a rigid 8 hour block, work is just one of those chores I do, and I align blocks of time much like I would for cleaning the bathroom, getting groceries, zoning out on a show or a run, etc.
This means a lot of breaks and no-work times, and a lot of responses and participation at times when colleaguss in other regions don't expect it. It kinda works for me :)
The impression is that I never sleep, but in reality, it's just I am distributing the work hours far differently and I can get s lot more done this way. 1.5 hours in some morning over coffee for email, scattered calls throughout the day, in the evening set aside some time after dinner and exercise for some project work (actual coding or just thinking about it). Sometimes I just merge it with other activities that don't need my full attention (is it an evening walk or a planning session if I think about a project while walking?)
I am very lucky I have this flexibility, and I know it is not a universal thing that everyone can get, but not having such a rigid structure let me really break down my day to work the way I need. I still meet all deadlines, meet all meetings, and I define when I'm not answering emails or messages. It rubs some people the wrong way as they never know when to plan meetings that involve me since they rely on outlook scheduler, and unexpected meetings tend to not happen as often (which is good for me :) ), but ultimately I like having more control over when I allocate work time
Your comment semi-accurately reflects how I lived my life _before_ burning out. I sussed out when I tried to do a more 8-5 kind of thing. But I struggled to fit a lot of things other than "work".
Not acting rude or harsh to people, but instead just being honest and protective of our time, both work and personal. I do have a reputation of being "difficult to work with" from some people, but almost universally those who have that perception are the ones making heavy demands on my time because they themselves cannot influence the resolution. Sales managers, customer success managers, they spam meetings and unplanned calls and emails with no more content than "this has to be resolved yesterday" and other cliches. I have no qualms just outright ignoring them or calling them out for violating procedure/policy.
The same types that just want to keep a channel of updates open and to help buy time? Much better relationships as they understand the process more and respect people's time.
Basically there is a stress aspect, and it's not for everyone. For me, having those firm boundaries and being honest with myself that this is my time and it's my choice, I don't need to feel guilty for protecting it, it helped a lot
My biggest career regret is that I fell into the trap of not setting boundaries for fifteen years. What is clear to many people now was not to me then. Even now, I'm learning the basics like that there are different types of boundaries and in business which ones are most important to set and what happens if they aren't set.
Time-boundaries, for example, are commonly discussed, but equally important are socio-emotional boundaries. Have you ever stopped to realize that you talk to a lot of people daily, but lack emotional support or the deeper connections that come from being emotionally vulnerable? I have. It's easy to surround oneself with work friendships that only ever touch on surface-level topics. Having a clear emotional boundary helps create space for emotionally meaningful connections outside of work. That's a lesson I wish I didn't have to learn the hard way.
Earlier last week, used the metaphor of putting on your oxygen mask "first" in case of an airplane catastrophe, before putting on anyone else's mask, even your child's - think that's quite apt here.
I find that I'm someone who works well in nonstandard hours and would like to take this approach to work.
At the same time I find the "work whenever" structure very dangerous for me. There's always more that needs to be done than I can fit in a day. It's really easy for me to spending most of my day thinking about work or working, even when I'm doing something else.
Maybe I'm just not built for this kind of work, but I'm curious if you have a technique for dealing with this kind of thing
1. What are the high priority projects? 2. What must have my attention? What can be delegated and monitored? What can be delegated and forgotten? What is in our responsibilities and what needs to be redirected? 3. What is a personally engaging project I want to work on to stay excited?
1 and 3 are the ones I get careful about and closely monitor myself to see how tired I am and how my thoughts are; since a lot of my work is not just technical but also communication of this to a lot of persons (internal and external), I take the time to be very aware of my mood and my thoughts and feelings. If I'm feeling angry or grumpy towards everything, it's time to stop because this will bleed into my work and I've worked enough. I force myself to send an update that I will have something more substantial later and a brief summary of where we are at.
For technical items, I kind of let the linter tell me how many mistakes I'm making ;) If the linter is working hard, probably it means I'm just too tired to be effective, and it's time to write down my current thoughts and plans in the next 5 minutes and call it for them, and either rest for the day or relax a little
I constantly violate schedules so task lists and timers don't work for me. I prefer an ultimate deadline and I'll manage my way there. On a day to day basis I just decide what my task list is and the priority and then go one by one.
Hope this gives some inspiration.
But I haven't seen other people promoting "take short hours as a positive signal and long hours as a negative signal for making investment decisions" like this post. It's usually more "that's not sustainable" then "that's a sign you might not have exactly the right fit."
I think that's a fairly novel take and worth further thought.
I struggled with the culture for a long time because I naturally don't feel inclined to be in a distraction riddled office or work long hours. I find the stuff I work on outside of my job to be more interesting. I realized that the way I want to add value is by working smarter and by continuously focusing on high-leverage projects. If I get ostracized or penalized for not working long hours then so be it. I figure that I could always switch to a different team or company.
I'm glad the author is writing about this and I hope more places move away from glorifying working long hours.
Then later, when working with our first customers I found myself working long hours again.
Now I've backed off again somewhat.
So I don't think it's necessarily "when you don't know what else to do", for me it was driven by either not wanting to miss an opportunity or trying to hit some deadline.
Most of the time now I can choose when to do that, and often find it's more productive to be contemplative about things like new features rather than doing them in a hurry and having to do more refactoring later on. Then again, in some parts of your business cycle you simply don't have that luxury.
I recently resigned from a job where it was becoming clear the business wanted to set unrealistic deadlines and just expected devs to work extra to meet them. This company didn't offer shares or even have a bonus structure in place.
It is not ok to expect your employees to work extra to meet your (frankly unreasonable) deadlines when they don't even stand to gain anything from it.
I'm not so sure, I suspect all the reasons it's bad for an employee are equally true for a founder.
Still a well written and thoughtful post.
No that would be your mum
I don't understand why people are trying to guilt/shame others into working less. And yet, at the same time, watch documentaries about successful people (Kanye, Michael Jordan) talking about how hard they used to work and celebrate it.
In order for you to be on the top of your field, you need to put in hours and hours of work. You'd have to sacrifice the so called 'life' part of the equation. If you don't want to do that - fine! We just don't share the same values and priorities. Just like how I shouldn't shame you for not working hard, you shouldn't shame me for working hard.
If I start a company, it's totally okay for me to only get employees who share this view. I'd boast about how hard I work and how much we accomplished. I'd let my employees do that. And I'd compensate them accordingly. If you think that's toxic, so be it. I feel the real shame is not realizing your full potential and falling short of your dreams.
You are right about dedication. If I look back it's insane the amount of time I have spent improving my skills, learning new things. I don't do it for the money although sometimes it pays good.
I respect people working hard to launch a company but I cannot respect the posturing or the backstabbing dressed as professionalism.
Same thing with connections. Want to know why connections mattered in every job I have had, including my current one? Because I worked my ass off, did more than was asked of me, volunteered to do work outside of my immediate scope of work and most importantly made a point to always be on at least one cross-organizational or team outside my immediate work unit so I could actually be noticed by others. Yeah, you aren't going to be successful solely from "working" for 16 hours a day - what you do with those work hours matters too.
And you know what? It worked. The best jobs are the ones that come looking for you.
Another way to stand out? Become part of the internal expert network that exists within every organization. I ended up interacting with a lot of our contracting folks and I would always go out of my way to let them know I was available for "geek speak" translation - if they ever had something technical they didn't understand to just call me. Even if it wasn't for one of my contracts. Stuff like that provides dividends that can't be expressed by some silly metric. I'm pretty introverted but luckily those kinds of conversations tend to be one on one.
I find it beyond hilarious that there are so many people who think luck and "connections" are how most successful people got to where they are. Keep telling yourself that if you like and good luck with that long term. Success is not accidental and yes, good old fashioned (meaningful) hard work will still pay off.
I enjoy my work. It's what I'd be doing in my spare time if I didn't need or have this job. I've thought about this, and I think I'd stick around at my role even if I hit a windfall, because I want to see this through to the end, one way or another. Sometimes, in order to do the kind of job I would be proud of, I need to work very long hours. That's 100% fine with me, but it's not always been fine with some other people I work with.
I'll even go one step further; I like working with others who share this view on working. I know not everyone can do as I do, and not everyone wants to do as I do, but when I'm working with people who can and want to work long hours, I am substantially more satisfied at my job than when I work with 9-5ers.
I don't in any way begrudge those 9-5ers, I just would rather work with people who share my ability and desire to push as far as is needed to complete the work to a high standard that is usually not possible in 40 hours a week.
It just seems like I have to constantly kowtow to the 9-5ers because they get so bent out of shape when you suggest that their style of working is only one of many totally acceptable ways of living. "Work life balance!" they shout, but not all of us have bifurcated the concepts. Work and life don't have to be these entirely severed things, I much prefer to weave them together and work with other people who can weave them together successfully.
It's frustrating. There's some sort of moral nobility in "only" working 40 hours, like I'm the problem and they're just trying to live their lives. I don't mind! I just want to work with people who value the things I do.
Would you say the reward is commensurate for your effort?
If someone on my team chose to work 80 hours a week because they loved what they do then I would actively discourage them, and remove them from the team if they continued. Having someone like that around has several negative impacts;
- It makes other people resentful of the fact they have to work longer hours, or change their schedules, to keep up with features or testing. That leads to more staff churn.
- It's harder to have discussions about the work being done when someone is working outside of office hours, which leads to things being done as one person sees fit, or needing to be reworked often. That annoys other people on the team.
- Other people on the team who choose not to work more than their contracted hours would be very annoyed if they saw hours as a factor in compensation, leading to more staff churn.
- In a small business that charges for time in days, someone working 16 hours a day is essentially giving the customer work for free. If you charge for 2 days work, and tell the client you're doing 2 days work, but only work 1 day, that's dancing around the edges of potential fraud. A client could very reasonably argue that if you did the work in 1 day they should only pay for 1 day...
I would much rather have a good team of people working well together than have one hero doing most of the work.
So you don’t value this behavior - you view it as a liability to your team, for the reasons you outlined. None of what you have stated contradicts my point.
It shouldnt do though, your team should be able to work any number of hours and still be productive because things like illness, pregnancy, deaths, holidays occur and they are not always expected or planned.
> - It's harder to have discussions about the work being done when someone is working outside of office hours, which leads to things being done as one person sees fit, or needing to be reworked often. That annoys other people on the team.
Depends on the role the person is doing, a good team will be able to cater for those who do more hours, just view that person as like two people working then you can see your team is incapable of working with two people performing a task/job.
> Other people on the team who choose not to work more than their contracted hours would be very annoyed if they saw hours as a factor in compensation, leading to more staff churn.
Seems like a rehash of point 1 and that shouldnt matter.
>- In a small business that charges for time in days, someone working 16 hours a day is essentially giving the customer work for free. If you charge for 2 days work, and tell the client you're doing 2 days work, but only work 1 day, that's dancing around the edges of potential fraud. A client could very reasonably argue that if you did the work in 1 day they should only pay for 1 day...
Then you have a contract issue which is not handling your charges properly. Flip this around, what if you got super busy and had to do 16hrs a day to complete the job more quickly to get onto another project/source of income, would you still work 8hrs because you contract charges are wrong?
> I would much rather have a good team of people working well together than have one hero doing most of the work. I sense you despise individualism which might explain why so many people go work for themselves.
I'll clarify then. Point 1 is that people get annoyed having to work with someone who puts in more time because it makes their work harder. Point 3 is that if people see that someone got a raise or a promotion because they put more hours in, then they will think they won't get a raise or a promotion unless they put more hours in. They will see working longer hours as the barrier to advancement, and if they don't want to do that they'll leave.
I sense you despise individualism which might explain why so many people go work for themselves.
Saying I "despise individualism" is a bit melodramatic. I've run teams for the last 20 years or so and I've enough experience to understand that a good, well-motivated team of devs who communicate well and collaborate on a common goal is far more effective in the long term than a team who have a lone dev who's happy to grind out code in the middle of the night.
If you're a dev who works alone, with no other devs, no product person, no QA, no support, and no users to collaborate with then you probably can just hack on your code for however long you want without bothering anyone.
It is more of resentment of lower quality of output and a lot wasted time while looking like super hard worker.
People who work 80 hours a week dont have actually higher output. They get tired , myoptic and they get all their socialization in work. That means a lot of wasted time for everyone around while acted offended on suggestion that he/she is not the most performant person around.
And yes, this was repeated observation.
Plus, if you want to make this about individualism and maybe stray into a little game theory, if a team has someone doing loads of more work than other people, one day that person is going to leave and your team will suddenly take a massive hit in productivity. That makes everyone on the team look bad. Everyone does better when there isn't an outlier (apart from the outlier, obvs).
Yes. What they can't is do it all night long and all day long for months on end.
There are people whose hourly output is twice as múch as normal. I would even say that hourly output variation is much higher then "how many hours per week you are effective" in terms of output. And none of the "people angry because they have to test too much" ever happens.
The clincher is that you're never getting paid for the extra effort commensurate to it.
They are capable of causing me harm due to that trust, yes, but that's what opening yourself up is. If that happens, it will hurt, I will recover, and I will find a new way to mesh what I love with what I make money doing. It would suck, but I would survive it.
Quite literally arguing against the individual in support of a network: hivemind. It seems like you’re forgetting you’re talking to an individual.
It doesn’t make sense to wave away social needs as some trivial or “abstract” concern.
I can't interweave my ability to sit down and play guitar and piano, swim, go on hour long hikes with my dog, juggle, study Chinese, and write dnd campaigns. These activities are not conducive to your "blended style of work/life".
additionally it's all about compensation as well if everyone was working overtime then it sort of normalizes it.
As frustrating as you find it, I find it completely baffling that people have such single minded interests that they would choose to pursue just one thing more than 40 hours a week.
Use a tomato timer and hit the "Start" button every time you're truly doing work and "Stop" button when you're not. Bathroom breaks, employee chats, heating up lunches, break walks, posting on HN, etc... All that shit doesn't count.
Get back to us with the #s after you've done a sustained run for a month.
But that's not the point. The point is the 9-5ers have held the higher moral ground for years now, and I'm tired of having to apologize or justify my preference for longer work hours because it makes them feel bad. There's nothing wrong with what their work/life balance is, but there's also nothing wrong with what my work/life balance is.
Honestly it's not that bad if you work weekends. You still have plenty of time to do other things, you just can't get as into your hobbies as you might like. I had to quit my WoW raiding team to devote more time to this job, for example. I don't think anyone would argue my decision there was a huge loss, and honestly the ~15 hours a week I was dedicating to WoW is much better spent on work and work related things.
I'm definitely procrastinating right now by typing all this out, so this time doesn't "count", but it's usually during my 5 min breaks between 25 min sessions, so I don't consider it lost time.
One "pomodoro" takes 2 hours to complete.
On top of that I was doing the various agile meetings too, it was a lot.
Normally I do 3-5 pomodoros a day; one early in the morning, one to three during the day, then one late at night after the wife has gone to bed. I don't really take days off, so that ends up working out to a pretty decent clip, all things considered.
Do you have to maintain a certain sleep schedule or do you happen to naturally find it easy to work at this pace? How could I train myself to work as intensely?
Same with the evenings, and then I'll get 5 in which is a very productive day. Normally it doesn't really require any less sleep or even that much less time spent doing other things, I think the trick is working every day.
https://www.themuse.com/advice/take-it-from-someone-who-hate....
This has nothing to do with moral high ground.
People get mentally or physically exhausted after a normal day of work. You are the exception apperantly. Since I cannot find what you actually do I'm going to count it as a very easy job with no mental of physical exercise required.
...and I'm loving every minute of it. I committed to seeing this through at least until they don't need me anymore, and I fully intend on meeting that obligation, and possibly well beyond that if the work continues to be fun.
You'll note how the shame is being attempted in this very comment thread. It makes me sad. :(
If it turns out that management is not thinking this way in your company, then great! But I think most people commenting skeptically here are familiar with situations where one over-achiever in the team sets an impossibly high standard for everyone else and thus unwittingly causes them harm.
This is also why it is usually not considered a problem when a person pursuing their individual passion project puts in crazy hours. If you work for yourself, you're not setting standards for anyone else.
Meanwhile, if you set a standard that makes people expect your coworkers to work 60 hours a week, expect them not to like that.
This isn't theoretical. I'm currently doing it, and it's immensely fun!
I mainly was curious if he was young enough he was burning himself out and the burn out hadn't caught up to him.
Would you be OK if you were terminated for an unjust reason? If so, that's great. If not, that might mean you have other expectations than just working on the problem. I would reconsider my strategy in that case.
I kept telling myself it's good for me because I have a baby now, but the truth is I found another job to do over evenings and I feel less and less motivated at my day job. When you say that you enjoy working with people that are not 9-5, it resonates strongly.
I'd hate to see how that works in a large project - like SpaceX where teams have to build things.
IOW, consider you may be better off running your own show while you have this drive. And realize you'll want to hire the best and brightest regardless of their WLB preferences.
Currently it sounds like all the effort you are spending is in service to someone else's vision, and it better have equity involvement on your part because you WILL get interested in other things and unless you've built a war chest for your own ambitions, your work will be for nothing when you inevitably walk away - hopefully to do you own thing.
Don't make the mistake that your employer has your long-term interest in mind. It's not personal, it's just business. It's always what have you done for me lately
I'm not sure using SpaceX is the best example here given that they were (still are?) notorious for their grueling work hours [1][2]. If anonymous social media posts and Glassdoor reviews are at least a rough proxy, it seems that the hours are still long but trending down from 80-100hrs per week to something "more sane" like 50-60hrs per week [3].
[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/9a39av/a-spacex-employee-jus...
[2] https://www.vice.com/en/article/mgbnwp/the-odd-empathy-of-el...
[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/AerospaceEngineering/comments/oho00...
[4] https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/SpaceX-long-hours-Reviews-...
- Maintaining our relationship with our spouse
- Caring for our children
- Contributing in our community (neighborhood, friends, church, hobby group, open source project, etc.)
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Those coworkers who get bent out of shape are probably concerned that you're raising the employer's expectations of their employees.
They may also be concerned about you personally. Your coworkers may feel that putting so much time into your employment is unhealthy for you, even if you don't realize it. From their point of view, they can't understand how you can work like that and be healthy and happy. To you that may feel annoying and judgmental, but it comes from a place of concern and care.
Every time I interview for a position, people brag about how dedicated their team is and ask if I am willing to put in the hard work and all. I’ve literally never ever heard any recruiter say: “oh we work smart here, you know. We just spend the right amount of time so that everyone’s productivity is best”.
Most people I know and work with do less than 40 and aim to be more efficient at delivering in less time.
I had a friend who worked in the states for GE and he mentioned people just had to be seen to be in the office for at least 12 hours a day even if there was nothing to do. Is this kind of culture real?
It also adds toxicity to the work environment as those working long hours start to have little respect for people that set boundaries. The worst situation to be in is working for a manager who is a workaholic. Despite what they say they will absolutely judge you for setting boundaries and it will affect your career prospects.
- The market is not large enough right now. It was a huge market with huge incumbents with deep pockets
- The product is bad. A poorly designed product written by junior engineers
- Poor positioning. Fighting the big companies with no real value add is not a good strategy
- High competition. See above.
- Not talented team members. A rotating door of employees that leave in frustration.
- Poor alignment. Constant down time and everything is always on fire (hence 70+ hour work weeks).
- Poor founder. Definitely.
I had an employer who was exactly like that, so understood it better than others, giving me the leeway. Infact, most of my colleagues were like that. We had our own social life beyond the office, but I did not feel like socializing everyday anyway.
Say I decide to finish what I was working on before leaving, then run into some difficult problem, finish after midnight having completed the task and solved the problem now and forever for everyone. With those 8 extra distraction-free hours I've produced equivalent output of 3 regulation work days and 2 committee meetings. I win. The mistake one can then make is to think that this can be repeated at will by staying late all the time.
Reminds me of the WWII story about discussions to add more armor to planes that came back from battle where the holes in plans were, when someone pointed out there was no need to armor *those* places, those planes came back. Where armor obviously needed to be added was to the places where the surviving planes *didn't* have holes.
Jack Dorsey notoriously got kicked out of Twitter by activist investors for his lack of commitment. Elon Musk is worshipped by a massive audience who he tells he works hard, whilst simultaneously spending a load of time on twitter. It's performative.
Work is something that is done to reproduce life. Programming, reading, is not work, it is life activity itself, do it as you like.
Example 2: it does make sense to optimize biologically needed production. But it does not make really sense to optimize life activity. I like cycling, I measure my performance, but I'm ok that some people cycle just for fun.