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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

Possibly unpopular opinion – don't look to work at a <10 person startup if you don't want to put in those kind of hours. There are plenty of companies out there that will give you a great work life balance, fixed responsibilities, low pressure, big paychecks and more, and the trade off is that you won't get a chance at a 100x exit a few years down the line. You have to pick one of the two.

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Eh. If you talk with second-time founders, a really common theme is how inefficient in retrospect the work-all-the-time phase was and how they want to do it differently.

I don't have a lot of data on current <10 person startups, so maybe it's all different now. But the times I was working 80-100 hour weeks were just not time well spent. It was not, "How can I deliver the most in the time I have?" It was "OMG pressure makes me so anxious I'm going to work all the time to avoid thinking about the stakes." It was more drama than effectiveness.

And people have been saying so for a long time. E.g.: https://lostgarden.home.blog/2008/09/28/rules-of-productivit...

Also frequently a good chunk of that 80-100 is watching YouTube or cruising Reddit and convincing yourself you were putting in real hours.

That or the leadership is inexperienced and get the team locked in a build trap.

Half of my best ideas happen outside of work. If I spend 70% of my waking hours at work we’re gonna have a bad time.

Your opinion is probably popular among its audience, but really that’s a shame. There’s a wealth of evidence that such an investment in hours is either counterproductive or short lived or both. The human impact can be devastating. The reward can be somewhere between fleeting and extremely deleterious.

I’m a former workaholic who put in countless 60-100 hour weeks, and mostly I made that choice on my own, but I sincerely wish I had heeded the warnings sooner. My 60-100 hour weeks weren’t 50-150% more productive, ever. They were just exhausting, maybe permanently.

There are good reasons to avoid putting in 80 hour weeks but doing so because someone who put in 100 hour weeks had a bad experience isn't one of them. The level of stress isn't linear as the weekly number of hours increases.

> someone who put in 100 hour weeks had a bad experience isn't one of them

I wasn’t so much trying to make my example a reason, as to say that I relate my own experience to the wealth of evidence.

> The level of stress isn't linear as the weekly number of hours increases.

This is true, and I definitely can relate to that as well. And I’d still feel the same way, now, if I’d only ever worked 50 hours in a week.

I’ll also add that the level of stress isn’t even consistent over multiple sustained weeks of the same level of overwork. When I even could work a 60 hour week, the second one in a row was much harder. The next one drastically harder still, and so on. And my probably-permanent burnout wasn’t from one particularly long week, it was from sustaining 60-100 hour weeks for about six months straight, with a lot of prior stressors, while developing a very strong internal rejection of sustaining anything like it while it was happening. In the end it was an action motivated by a sense of duty to address problems that put me in this position as fully as I could, so I could move on and never overwork for anyone or anything ever again.

But I’m cautious even saying all of that now, because any way I frame it suggests there’s an overwork compromise that might make sense. There isn’t. In hindsight, the first week I put too much of myself into work was one too many.

Ah, fair enough. Your opinion is still relevant. I would still like to hear from those that never exceeded 80 because there is a bit more of a chance they could have pulled it off.

Now tell me, what’s the expected value of a 1% chance of a 100x return?

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