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Comment by jokoon | Hacker News Reader

70h per week, I really can't imagine a world where I could accept this.

Sometimes I try to imagine how the alternative would be in a planned economy for software.

On one hand, it would be very slow and very inefficient.

But on the other hand, venture capitalism also has its flaws. Sometimes it sounds like there is an "excess efficiency" that leads to burnout and non-sense, where you constantly need to quote-unquote "innovate".

In my view there is a limit about innovation, you can't always "disrupt" over and over and over again.

If I get paid that much money, I'm going to work on my own terms, there is no way somebody will compromise my health like that.

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> 70h per week, I really can't imagine a world where I could accept this.

On my own company, when single, and living in my one room apartment? Absolutely.

With a family, children, with tons of responsibilities and in someone elses employ? Not on your life.

I dislike this trope of a single person having nothing better to do than work. Single people have responsibilities too and have quality lives. They don't need to work themselves to death

Sure, but if the alternative (for you) is to waste time in front of the TV or gaming, it may be a valid point.

I wouldn’t consider those things to be a waste of time at all…

Careful there -- relaxing or enjoying something mundane is not wasting time.

We have been conditioned to call things like this a waste of time but it doesnt mean it is. Not for everyone. Capitalism would have us believe we must constantly be delivering value that is defined by external standards but that is a dangerous game.

4000 Weeks is a pretty good book with more on this topic.

Gaming, and watching TV sometimes may not be complete waste of time. But both are addictive, and can easyly make your life miserable.

This isn’t really relevant to the current discussion about how much extra time is spent on “work” beyond normal working hours. Working ~40 hours a week and choosing to spend most of your other conscious hours consuming media is a different situation from spending most/all of your hours on the latter.

https://i.redd.it/3hn1jb4p3ih41.jpg

Not sure I see your point. "Choosing to spend most of your other conscious hours consuming media" is certainly choosing to waste a significant part of one's lifetime. Doing it all the time is wasting most of it, and likely being broke (with exception of rare edge cases). The question we touched in this particular branch: whether extra work constitutes a better alternative to more gaming/media in the absence of other obligations/fields of activity (such as family)

Please see your comment I was replying to for context on this thread. Addiction is what I was referring to, which is a different issue than whether one is wasting time to any degree. I have no real issue with folks debating on the latter.

You are not necessarily producing value, you are ensuring you are capable of producing value in the future.

“Capitalism would have us believe that…” if you were lazy in a hunter gatherer tribe they’d just no give you food, otherwise punish, or exile you. Some things are more fundamental than capitalism

I think it’s not that single people have nothing better to do. It’s that you would need to be single and have basically no life to do this kind of 70h work week (or be prepared to end up single, cuz you sure won’t be tending to your relationships/responsibilities )

It has got to fuck up your body too. You are either asleep or sitting at a desk. Maybe sitting in a commute too.

As a consciously single I disagree along the lines of this argument (not with the argument itself). You’re seeing lost relationships as something destructive, and sure it is, but also disregard what others do as something that you can get rid of without any harm (“no life anyway”). I like my life, who’s anyone to judge what is important in it or not. Our world-wide society has this trope. “Hey, these people have kids(!), and these are in relationships, etc etc. And you are single nolifer, your rights and opportunities can wait”. As if a kid or a partner were some kind of a universal voucher.

It seems like you're reading the argument incorrectly. The argument being made is

> If you have a family, then there's no way you have time for 70hr weeks

The argument is _not_

> If you do not have a family, then you _do_ have time for 70hr weeks

Seems like you're projecting a bit. I didn't see the person your responding to make any judgement about a life with a partner/kids vs one without.

You’re right on projection, and I shouldn’t have written “you” and “disregard” in the same sentence. I meant some part of normal-life folks, addressing them via that line. My mistake, sorry all for confusion.

I’m not judging people who are single w/o kids. just saying if you’re in a relationship or have kids that is a commitment and time needs to be spent on there.

I don’t think you should overwork yourself cuz you don’t have kids. Do what you want with your life.

It depends on what point in your life you are. I was at one point single and fully committed to work. I worked sometimes even 12 hours per day, every day, pulling in weekends too and I had a payoff for that. I’m single now too, but I’m not doing that. I’m focusing on dating. Different people, at different times have different priorities. It’s not any one individual thing that’s bad, it’s elevating one above the rest.

I’m not trying to speak for everyone. I’m saying that I personally can absolutely see myself doing it in these situations. Not trying to imply anything about anyone else.

And I dislike the trope of working being orthogonal to quality of life. Sitting in front of the computer working on my own thing is the ultimate enjoyment. That's what's giving me a quality life.

Yeah there's work (activity) and there's work (job)

I love working (activity) -- coding is a hobby I long ago made the mistake of monetising haha.

My stuff? I'll spend a weekend chasing a dead end without a second thought.

General sort of cog in the machine day to day work? You're paying me to be a bit bored a lot of the time. Not a complaint or anything, just the routine stuff that can't be automated yet.

Fun comes from learning new things, money comes from being paid for what you already learned.

Of course this is just me, if everyone was like me the world would suck. Absolutely no judgement if you get your fun outside of an IDE!

E: bit of context I'm currently single and have no dependents, I would imagine (hope) my priorities would change if that changed

Yep, this so much.

Working for somebody else, where I have little stake in the company? I won't just put in the bare minimum to not get fired, but I also won't work absurd hours, especially on a salary.

My own stuff? I'm ready for the 40 (job) + 60 (my own projects) work week!

For reference, I'm very young and no where close to having a family.

> My own stuff? I'm ready for the 40 (job) + 60 (my own projects) work week!

Since you said you're very young I assume you're still at school/university and haven't had a tech job yet.

This doesn't work. Time is not the biggest factor, energy and focus are. You can only put in 40hrs and be extremely drained.

It's very unlikely you're going to be able to perform well at work and then be productive for another 60hrs on personal projects, especially not at your first job when you're learning a very large amount of new stuff.

Even just 60hrs of personal projects is probably way too much time relative to energy and focus (Your energy and focus will likely be drained before the 60hr mark).

I think this is where the Elon Musk is so detached from reality. Because he can do exactly what he wants all day, and he loves what he is doing what he does all day is not work. Certainly in the sense that say, assembling parts of a weird electric car for 12 hours a day whilst being trapped in the factory for 24 hours is work.

I see it in smaller business. I once got a phone call from my then boss, a sort of VC, who was clearly drunk, who could not make my meeting because he was doing BD. They worked collosal hours on this, in the corporate entertainment suites of the local sporting venues, in the city bars etc. Even lunch was a work activity for them.

A lot of people are not wired this way, we can't expect it from all.

I think the word work has a specific meaning. It's work is a phrase. Nobody is saying you should not enjoy your work but work is associated with drudgery and tedium in the common usage

There’s not really a “trope” beyond it being necessary but not sufficient to be able to work 70+ hour weeks.

They don’t have to. They could take a normal job and don’t have to do the extraordinary job of founding a company.

How is that a trope? Everybody here who has kids used to not have kids, and all would agree that before they had kids they had significantly more time to dedicate to non-kid-raising activities.

Nobody is saying single people have "nothing better to do". Just that they very often have more flexibility with what they can reasonably choose to do.

On my own company, when single, and living in my one room apartment? Absolutely.

If you’re around 20 maybe. Before you’ve already developed a hair-trigger on chronic disorders.

In the US 70 hr work weeks at startups and even certain industry's are not abnormal. Are those people usually making good decisions, thinking clearly, and not being jerks? Nope, but it's what a lot of people willingly do. I've seen people pull 80 hr weeks

> On my own company, when single, and living in my one room apartment? Absolutely.

Speak for yourself. I have hobbies, a workout routine, friends to meet up with, family members to visit, and beauty sleep to catch. If you're working 70h a week you're sacrificing most if not all of those things.

He already said he was single. You can have a workout routine and plenty of sleep even when working 70h weeks. Just skip the Netflix and other people, for a time.

I'm single too... I don't see the relevance, though. You don't just have to like working. You have to actively decide against doing much of anything else. If you are working ten hours a day with no weekend, or 14 hours a day with one, you're going to be exhausted for the rest of that time.

You can fit working out in there (~30-60 min a day, plus travel time if you don't have your own equipment) if you're willing to burn the candle at both ends like that. At that point you will have committed the overwhelming majority of your time, and if you try to add anything else to your life, any kind of unexpected outing or emergency, or even just waking up one day and not feeling up for it, will have to come directly out of the time you've budgeted for your work and health.

I forgot that some people still commute. I assumed that you have an office in your residence and a gym in the garden. You will have committed most of your time, yes. Still at least in my experience it let me do more in a quarter than in a year of taking it easy. You can retire after a few years, which should still be early enough to enjoy life.

I have never done a 70h week. probably 50h the top. I think it would be impossible for me. I mean I could be physically in an office for that long… but that is not the same thing.

It's impossible, that's why. I have seen people in my role work a lot more hours than me, but not to turn out more work than me.

For how long? Not that I think it's healthy or anyone should do this, but for most of the past two decades, American military services regularly deployed units of thousands at a time for 15 months overseas, during which they worked up to 20 hour days with 2 hours of sleep, 7 days a week for the entire 15 months. And they did this with zero chance or expectation that they might get rich, also knowing there was quite a good chance they'd end up permanently disabled.

For better or worse, devotion to a cause is a proven motivator of human action.

As for alternatives in the business world, we'd need some economic system that wasn't analogous to warfare in which one firm outcompetes all others to take most of the winnings. If you want a lesson from the US losing in Afghanistan, and arguably losing in Iraq, in spite of being able to drive its labor force to such extreme exertion, consider that a massive advantage of the insurgency was their ability to mobilize a part-time gig-based workforce that mostly worked from home. But which lesson does business learn from that? Allow work from home? Or getting part-time contractors with no benefits to kill themselves and sacrifice children for you?

>70h per week, I really can't imagine a world where I could accept this.

I can think of several. The grandiose ones: your kid has cancer, the kind that might be fixable, but there is no treatment, and you have to design one. You have a viable theory for nuclear fusion or carbon sequestration and need to get funding for and then perform the experiment. There is a verified meteor/comet strike and there's some hope of saving people underground, but it needs to be built and stocked.

In reality, you don't need grandiosity. This life is 'acceptable' to a lot of people, especially small business owners, the store owner/operator, or car mechanic, who effectively lives at their store. For others there is "paying your dues", doctors doing a residency, grad students doing slave labor on something only tangentially related to their degree. For others, like farmers, they work like this for some part of the year, every year.

all those example don't apply to digital contract software.

if someone is passionate about their job, I'm not sure they're being well paid, or they also have very rare skills, so it's an exception, not a rule.

also I live in a country with good healthcare.

> Sometimes I try to imagine how the alternative would be in a planned economy for software.

> On one hand, it would be very slow and very inefficient.

Why do you say that? Large, "boring" sectors of the economy would probably work just fine being algorithmically steered.

Because there are 0 successful examples for it. And as someone born in USSR let me say if you like to experiment with planned economy you better choose a country nobody will regret leaving in dust afterwards

That's not a good reasoning, there were 0 successful examples of democracy for millenia, until stable Western democracies emerged.

Anyways, more concretely: huge vertically integrated megacorporations behave much like centrally planned economies, and they seek to be doing just finem

Your first argument could be somewhat interesting point for debates if the latest planned economy attempt were some hundreds years ago. The second one is no argument at all: planned economy is a radical departure from the feedback loop of the current economy within which all corporations operate.

Because they wouldn't be. A planned economy just takes the power of business owners and adds it to the pile of power politicians have. These algorithms would just 'happen' to suggest things favorable to those in charge.

I said that to appeal to the HN crowds.

Computing and software was researched and invented in a planned manner (NASA etc).

Maybe you can't "expand" and "generalize" software in a planned economy, if you want everything to be made with software. The article talks about about 80 competitors, so it can easily be said something should be planned.

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