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Comment by keiferski | Hacker News Reader

Work hard. Cry less. And realize you’re part of history

No, sorry, but you probably aren't. Zynga isn't changing the world and neither are 99.9% of the startups coming out of SV.

The over-working culture is exactly that - a culture. It has nothing to do with actual reality, and everything to do with perceived reality. Great, long-term companies aren't built by entrepreneurs who sleep 2 hours a night.

P.S.: not getting enough sleep decreases productivity. The 37Signals guys have covered this a few hundred times at this point. I also seem to recall Richard Branson saying that he "needs his 8 hours."

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It's also worth mentioning that Jamie Zawinski, cited in the article, burned out and quit the industry. If your startup is really changing the world, fine. But is working on <generic web-app> worth sacrificing your love for programming itself (not to mention the health effects and opportunity costs involved)?

> P.S.: not getting enough sleep decreases productivity. The 37Signals guys have covered this a few hundred times at this point. I also seem to recall Richard Branson saying that he "needs his 8 hours."

I think the culture of correlating working longer with working harder comes from occupations where there is a relatively close connection between the two, such as in occupations that primarily involve physical labor. However, a lot of the work done by startup founders is not in the physical realm, and therefore the efficiency with which that work is completed can vary drastically depending on the mental state of the worker. Of course, the worker's mental state is heavily dependent on his/her sleep schedule.

Well, sort of. Working all the time isn't sustainable. But the point of starting a startup isn't to do things that are long-term sustainable, it's to build as much as you can in a short period of time to outrace competitors and adapt quickly to whatever comes up.

And I say that as someone who needs work-life balance -- that's why I don't have a startup. I want to spend time with my wife and kids and hobbies and things, so I have a nice job that I can go to every day and then come home again.

Expecting to maintain work-life balance while creating a startup is bringing a knife to a gunfight.

Sleeping 2 hours a night is a sprint. Unless you are a superhuman, you can't sleep 2 hours a night for more than a week and still be more productive than someone on a normal schedule.

The point being, you can sprint in a crunch. You can sprint to meet a deadline next week. But unless you expect your company to be bought a week after you found it, you should probably be pacing yourself at least a little. Go ahead and give up work/life balance- for a medium-term project you can risk burnout- and go ahead and work 16 hours a day. But get 8 hours of sleep.

Amen. Sprinting works when you can see the finish line. Sprinting with no finish line in sight? Just stupid, and you're probably never going to make it to the finish line.

Ok, that sounds fair. Two hours is indeed not sustainable except in sprints. Though I've known spooky people who seem to be able to get by with not much more than that on a sustained basis.

> Though I've known spooky people who seem to be able to get by with not much more than that on a sustained basis.

Yes, but these people are (physiologically) the exception not the rule (this characteristic is not uncommon for sailors, for some types of race sailing it's pretty much a base requirement).

You are talking about polyphasic sleep, which when you train and skill is a great tool to sleep less, but I think these guys are not talking about that, they talk about being "la tête dans le guidon" as we say in France => head in the handlebar litteraly, or "sous l'eau" => underwater. It is a myth. Startups are all about creativity. If you don't sleep enough, you are not creative. PERIOD.

Let me add more: not creative, not logical, not coherent. Incapable of being social.

Studies show that chronic lack of sleep is equivalent of being drunk when driving. Do we really want the cognitive equivalent of drunk workers "changing the world"?

Unsurprisingly, some people don't fit well with our limited current understanding of sleep.

On the other hand, don't completely discount the possibility that some of the people you know have access to amphetamine. Careful use can sustain performance for weeks before tolerance sets in.

Amphetamine abuse shows up a lot in all the places you'd expect -- athletes, military personnel, emergency services and hospital workers, even lawyers. With the pressure to perform, it wouldn't surprise me if it's a quiet problem in startups, too, especially since drug testing is pretty much anathema to the culture.

  > outrace competitors and adapt quickly to whatever
  > comes up.

I am afraid it's not about outracing competitoros, but the fear of competitors. At the end you just get exhausted and fail without any competitors in sight.

    > But the point of starting a startup isn't to do things that are long-term sustainable

And we wonder why BigCo acquisitions of startups rarely pan out.

You have to evaluate how you want to work from a personal perspective and your relationship with the company you work for.

I agree that constantly over-working can have a detrimental effect, but so can not reacting to the 'right' deadline.

I've seen the result of an extremely successful startup (many years back) after the IPO and multiple stock splits, and no doubt there was a 'effort debt' being paid by the company after that period.

However, I very much doubt many of those people financially regretted their efforts. They won the lottery.

> Great, long-term companies aren't built by entrepreneurs who sleep 2 hours a night.

I'd add a qualifier to that. They aren't usually built by entrepreneurs who get very little sleep. They sometimes are, though, and sometimes it's because a person in good physical health has a very important task to complete in a short amount of time, like the example cited in the article of JWZ helping build a web browser.

I don't think keiferski is talking about having to crunch for a few days, but about sleep deficiency as a lifestyle.

Mid and long-distance runners (or cyclist) don't sprint for kilometers, they sprint when they have to. And if you have to sprint all the time, something's wrong.

>>entrepreneurs who sleep 2 hours a night

That is just hyperbole. In reality is more like sleep 8 hours and work 12 to 16 hours a day.

You don't need to take your health advice from 37s -- the book "The Way We're Working Isn't Working" is basically nothing BUT cited research that shows how overwork hurts everybody & everything, including the employer/project.

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