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Sure if you can theoretically weave life and work together that's great I suppose , but for some of us that would be exceptionally difficult given our interests and priorities.

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.

The fact that you're posting some giant message about how much you work means it's unlikely you are truly working as many hours as you think.

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.

I completed 32 pomodoros last week, which is above my average of ~25 for the past year and change, and a lot of my job isn't focused work, and none of that pomodoro time included any of the project management, meetings, or conversations I had with the team to figure out what we're up to, what the problems are, and what we're doing next.

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.

Is 32 pomodoros equal to 32*25 = 800 minutes (13h 20m)?

Something doesn't add up with their comments does it.

A pomodoro is four 25 minute sessions with a 5 minute break between each session.

One "pomodoro" takes 2 hours to complete.

That makes 32x25x4 = 3200 minutes (53h 20m), which is a significant amount of time for focused work.

You're telling me!

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.

That's an incredible pace, especially not taking any days off. When I do so, I lose my sense of time. I feel like, I've been working forever. I have to switch to a different task for at least a day to recover.

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?

Last week was rough, but generally it's not bad to do 3 pomodoros every day and usually I'm rolling during the day so it's fine to slip in the 4th.

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.

"Using this method, you break your workday into 25-minute chunks separated by five-minute breaks. These intervals are referred to as pomodoros. After about four pomodoros, you take a longer break of about 15 to 20 minutes."

https://www.themuse.com/advice/take-it-from-someone-who-hate....

> The point is the 9-5ers have held the higher moral ground for years

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.

The simple solution - work two jobs. I don't care if you work 80 hours a week. I don't think it's healthy or sustainable, but maybe it is for you. And I certainly don't think your fatigued work it's as beneficial as putting in a good 40 hours. But feel free. There is no reason it has to be the same job. Make two sets of 9-5ers happy.

Meanwhile, if you set a standard that makes people expect your coworkers to work 60 hours a week, expect them not to like that.

Simpler solution: work with people who share my values.

This isn't theoretical. I'm currently doing it, and it's immensely fun!

Out of curiosity, I wonder about two personal questions. How old are you and how are you compensated for the extra hours? I'm not sure you're willing to share, but if you're working 60 hours you should have equity or extra pay.

I have equity, yes, and I'm not comfortable talking about my age but I will say my wife works harder than I do and we don't have any children.

You’re not comfortable talking about your age? Why not? Can you just give a broad range?

He's not comfortable divulging that. Let it go. I understood and expected he may not want to share either of the things he expected. Declining information about yourself online is reasonable and requires no further explain action.

I mainly was curious if he was young enough he was burning himself out and the burn out hadn't caught up to him.

Saying “I am under 30” for instance is hardly divulging anything that could possibly be sensitive.

Heck, putting in a best 20 hours is often better than standard 40h of which a lot is stalled or peak focus is out.

I'm not necessarily on your side, but I expected the "contrarian" take in this blogpost to be "actually, I think long hours are great!", not "maybe long hours aren't great!"

Me too! I was thinking it was going to be a paean to the joys of working long and hard!

Enjoy it while you can. Realize though that being "employee #1" and wearing all the hats while working with others that "share your values" means they probably think they themselves are "employee #1" and wearing all the hats, which obviously can't be the case in a well functioning team.

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'd hate to see how that works in a large project - like SpaceX where teams have to build things.

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-...

I don’t have a moral issue with it in isolation but it does “throw off the curve” in a system where we are all valued relative to our peers. A student who asks for more homework because he likes it is great, but he is going to draw a lot of ire from his peers.

I hope that you are aware that you are greatly empowering your employer by intricately interleaving your work and concept of life. If your social network, your personal support network, your community and self are tied to your work; then your employer has tremendous power over you.

Two people can have political disagreements without one of them being ignorant.

In principle if two people disagree politically, they are both ignorant. If they were enlightened, they'd agree on a common policy.

People can disagree on which values they want to emphasize without either of them being ignorant.

This is a needlessly adversarial take. An employer that values you will empower you with commensurate compensation.

Hardly needless. Employers throw out faithful and dedicated employees all the time, even in ageist industries where it is difficult for them to find another job. I saw this happen to a close friend's father; their financial stability crumbled. He seemed to have aged 10 years overnight. It was quite a few years before I saw him not visibly depressed. Despite being a talented engineer (not in software) he never found an engineering job again.

How is this relevant? Presumably the reason we’re discussing bc in this thread for working longer hours isn’t job security, but job satisfaction. I don’t see how this connects, frankly.

I was responding to a comment that spoke about employers who value employees as if this is always clear to employees, or even true in the long run.

In an employer throws you out, then they ostensibly don’t value you enough to keep paying you.

hahahahah this is good!

They absolutely will not. They will pay you the minimum amount they can to keep you around which, if you love your work so much you’d do it for fun, isn’t a lot.

An employer that values you will empower you with commensurate compensation.

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.

> 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.

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 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 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.

Seems like a rehash of point 1 and that shouldnt matter.

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.

I see where you are coming from which is you want a team, which is understandable but that doesnt work for the individual whose happy grinding out code in the middle of night aka the lone wolves, but then would they be working in a team in the first place?

would they be working in a team in the first place?

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 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 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.

That's certainly true of some devs, but I've also seen devs who don't have that problem. Some people genuinely can write good code all night long for months on end. That's why the points I outlined aren't about the individual dev. The impact on other people is still bad even if the dev is great. All of my reasoning about why I don't want 'heroes' come down to preferring a strong team of good devs over a good team behind a brilliant dev.

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).

> Some people genuinely can write good code all night long for months on end.

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.

Yup, from experience, you can pull this off for maybe a week or two before you start causing problems or negative output, or get actual health issues. And that's if you're young, older people tend to fall off sooner.

The clincher is that you're never getting paid for the extra effort commensurate to it.

Name one case where this has been true. It's not the case at any business, even ones with the lavish funds to do so. Just about everywhere, new hires will be making more than tenured employees of comparable level regardless of their expertise and proven value.

Yes, they benefit substantially from my work, and I benefit substantially from doing work I love. Win-win. Not sure what's wrong with that. Besides, I don't just trust anyone, the people I work for now have earned that trust over time; I want to see them succeed, because I succeed when they do, and vice versa.

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.

You would have him subvert his motivation away the source of his contentment for something as abstract as benefiting the quality of the network of relationships?

Quite literally arguing against the individual in support of a network: hivemind. It seems like you’re forgetting you’re talking to an individual.

I’m for people working a lot if they want to and it makes them happy, but humans are inherently social beings and community is incredibly important to our mental health. OP (of this thread) even says part of what they enjoy is working with others who similarly value their work.

It doesn’t make sense to wave away social needs as some trivial or “abstract” concern.

It's weird, but I think you are right. For context, I worked like you for most of my career and only recently joined a scale up that has very strong work life balance. It feels like the people don't care and I am demotivated. When my tech lead told me that if he'd be expected to work overtime he'd quit (he's great otherwise).

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.

Many of us "only" work 40 hours at our paid employment, but do loads more hours for our other jobs:

- Maintaining our relationship with our spouse

- Caring for our children

- Contributing in our community (neighborhood, friends, church, hobby group, open source project, etc.)

---

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.

> I want to see this through to the end, one way or another.

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.

Good for you, I in no small way envy your dedication to your work (despite choosing to work 30 hour weeks myself).

Would you say the reward is commensurate for your effort?

I agree with you, and based on how adversarial the comments are on this comment, I think you have the real "contrarian take on working long hours."

It's the other way around. You think there is "nobility" in working more than 40 hours a week. There isn't. Stop pretending.

Mark my words: in a matter of years, you're going to be a husk. Ask me how I know.

What type of work do you do?

I wear lots of hats right now; I was employee #1 so I did whatever engineering needed doing to get our platform created and functioning. Frontend, ops, backend, selecting vendors, eventually hiring, working on compliance, helping define strategy, project management... basically anything that needs technical expertise I'm leading.

...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.

It seems pretty obvious that you work at a very small company with little or no layers of management, and most likely, without any other typical constraints that most workers deal with -- like fixed hours, an inconvenient office or commute, lots of unproductive meetings, limited amount of annual PTO, lack of knowledge/understanding whether anything you do has actual impact at the company, etc. Putting in 70-80 hours week after week in a scenario like that where it's very clear you're simply an employee is pretty crazy. But for a passion project, where it's just you and a few close friends/coworkers, sure, go for it. Hell, for about 3-4 months during Covid I was easily putting in 90+ hours on a project I loved working on. It's not really as heroic as you're making it out to be.

Not sure why you think I believe it to be heroic, I just think I shouldn't be shamed for spending my time how I want to.

You'll note how the shame is being attempted in this very comment thread. It makes me sad. :(

I think "shame" is a needlessly inciteful description. The main issue is that, in a company with multiple employees, your behavior is not happening in isolation. When one person is working 80 hours a week, it is very common for management to see everyone who chooses to structure their time differently (e.g. because they have kids or elderly relatives to care for) as a slacker.

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.

He is just working himself to death making somebody else rich and thinking that this is a win-win situation. It would be hilarious if it wouldn't be sad. Also he seems to be working in a startup which means he will most likely go bust and all his work will have been for nought.