John Carmack on shorter work weeks (2016)
news.ycombinator.com
news.ycombinator.com
If I do focused mental work for even seven hours I'm completely wiped. I absolutely can't read a normal book at that point. Clicking the next meme on reddit is about all I can manage. And yeah, my wife and kids aren't getting a lot from me on those days.
I'm surprised that Carmack seems to find this absurd. Am I super atypical? Or is he? I'm actually curious: after let's say 5 hours of in-person interviews, do most people come home and fire up the CAD software to work on rockets or whatever, like Carmack, or do they hang out on the couch vegetating and feeling like they have a minor hangover or head cold, like me?
Interviews are high stress, emotionally draining, and, honestly, frequently rather degrading due to being talked down to. It's like having the fight or flight part of your brain firing on max for 5 hours. I agree that the only thing I really want to do at the end of such days is turn off.
That is wildly different from my day to day. After work, I'm still hyped to go to the gym, do some woodworking, program more, study. The world is an exciting place.
I've also found that if I succumb to the reddit infinite-scroll, a sense of numbness washes over me that takes awhile to shake free. I scroll like I'm seeking a high and nothing is doing it. Contrast that with, say, reading a book after work. Such a thing has never left me feeling the same empty feeling.
Personally, I am drained by meetings and am in my happy place in front of an editor working on a grand project, one that I find interesting.
The moment work stops being interesting, eg due to lack of complexity, I leave.
Chaos and complexity energise me.
Smart Guy Productivity Pitfalls https://waivek.github.io/website/tooltip.html
That said, even today I can definitely work myself into a state where my brain just collapses if it attempts to do anything complex, and doing even the simplest chores seems like climbing Mt. Everest.
However I have some morbidly obese co-workers who still manage to keep up with me and stay sharp for longer in some cases. Likewise I've read some blogs about some people who genetically can be at full capacity, or near to it, off of 5 hours of sleep consistently. I'm honestly jealous
I'm sure he has a strong will but I think Carmack is some variety of biologically gifted for sure, lucky bastard.
It's certainly given him an advantage, though he "jokes" that he'll probably die early.
>Robert Sapolsky, who studies stress in primates at Stanford University, says a chess player can burn up to 6,000 calories a day while playing in a tournament, three times what an average person consumes in a day.[1]
[1] https://www.espn.com/espn/story/_/id/27593253/why-grandmaste...
Out: CO2
That extra C atom comes from your metabolism. If you're in a calorie deficit, it has to come from your C atom reserve storage.
That's a way of saying that breathing faster won't burn more fat just because of the breathing: burning fat is a bit more elaborate than that.
Which is wrong, since breathing involves pumping air with your muscles.
Yes, and that will be your muscle mass as well as body fat if you're not exercising and maintaining a decent protein intake.
It is true that chess at the competitive level burns calories. (More like an extra 1000 a day during a tournament.) Coupled with tournaments not allowing food, players do lose weight over a few days! But like you said, the 6000 number is an exaggeration.
We're all different. I certainly know people who can be focused for more than seven hours a day (some colleagues, me when I was younger, my family doctor, my dentist). Personally, as an introvert, what drains me most is interacting with people. I think I could be coding 7 hours on my personal project and still be rather fresh. But this isn't what my job looks like, unfortunately.
On the flip side, even for coding I don't love, I can usually grind out 9-10 hours at fairly high productivity; I usually won't because I have other priorities to balance but I can. If I find what I'm working on really interesting, I can do 12 hours at high productivity.
For work, I try to have 2 days a week where I put most of my meetings so that hopefully at least 1 or 2 days of the rest are high productivity.
Being able to solve interesting problems all day and directly reap the rewards is positively alien to the avg SWE enduring their 9-5 grind on 'business problems' in a CRUD gulag to pay off their boss' new yacht.
I on the other hand can go 12 hours getting up once or twice to go to WC and will skip lunch. Taking a break most of the time sounds like a punishment. When I’m working on a problem and hold a lot of information in my working memory taking a break would only set me way back. Meetings are avoided unless absolutely necessary. Emails and messages are answered before I shut down as they don’t require much focus. That’s how I love working. But I’m also very introverted and robotic. I need to find a more balanced approach and appreciate my gf’s influence on me but it doesn’t come naturally to me.
I then came to tech and started coding. It was a breath of relief. I didn’t know what you’re supposed to do on saturdays!
But when you get in the zone and start writing a large amount of non-crud code, seven hours is kinda the max. You’re totally wiped out. Coding a complex application is quite unlike anything except writing a complex novel or technical document. No one, I mean NO ONE who writes well writes for 11 hours a day lol. The most prolific writers average an hour.
There are SO MANY environmental and physiological factors which go into your state of mind. Some variables that I try to control for:
1. What (if anything) did you eat today
2. How much water did you drink
3. Did you shower today
4. How much sleep did you get, or how long have you been awake (probably the most important one right here)
5. What is the warmth of the light where you are working (is it cloudy and rainy outside?)
6. What is the temperature of the room
7. Is anything else going on in your life occupying your mind right now? If you take medication: did you take your medications?
8. Did you exercise today? Do you exercise at all? Are you healthy?
9. How is your posture?
10. Is your work environment clean? Is it noisy?
11. Do you work better with music on, or in silence?
12. Did you drink so much caffeine that you are now manic and can't focus?
13. Are you happy?
The brain is a part of the body
I think it depends precisely what you are doing. There is a difference between low cognitive effort (e.g. reading) and high effort (e.g. creating an algorithm or playing chess). Low effort uses glucose, whereas high-effort requires the microglia (the brain's immune cells) to create lactate and transport it to the neurons. Excess microglia activation has been linked to anxiety, depression and neuroinflammation.
I suspect it's not physically possible for a chess grandmaster to play for 90 hours a week, but probably quite easy for the average person to read or write for 90 hours a week (with some breaks).
>start writing a large amount of non-crud code, seven hours is kinda the max.
Most programming jobs are just writing "crud code" if you want to call it that...basically mostly meetings, and cranking out banal code. You can certainly do this for 90 hours a week without fatigue, although it will likely lead to burnout in the long-term, so it's probably better to find a job that does require significant mental effort, but without requiring 90 hour weeks.
The only time I've found it has come close is when actually writing a hypothesis or review paper: having to read through the literature in order to come up with a coherent theory while juggling the concepts in my head. It's very similar to solving a programming problem, and does involve significant mental effort.
But it probably also depends on the speed that it's done at. For complex algorithms or prototypes I prefer to just power through and get the whole thing done to the prototype stage in half a day (or whatever it takes, depending on the complexity), then spend the next month (or whatever) fleshing it out. There are probably other ways of doing it that don't require such cognitive effort at the beginning, but I find that for complex problems that's sometimes the best way of solving them, at least in my experience, and it only involves significant mental effort for a very short period of time.
I would say that in such instances, often times the code is banal, but proper modeling of the reality, even in cases where final result looks like a classical crud, is where complexity hides.
I say "hides", because, from my experience, only those directly involved in the implementation are actually mentally exposed to it. If they care about the quality of the output, that is.
I can totally imagine that someone who's sufficiently intrinsically motivated, and has enough mental capacity, willpower or whatever to put in long hours, longer hours might very well produce a linear increase in productivity. But most people are going to be exhausted at some point. Or demotivated. And enough of that is going to bring productivity down.
So it's the kind of thing that might very well work for you, but you can't demand the same thing from others.
People mention REM and I don’t know how to be certain but I think I do hit REM, the fitbit refused to analyze sleep less than 4 hours for me, but when I’m just slightly over it, it reports good percentages of both REM and Deep, 23% REM and 21% Deep, according to them above average. It never likes my durations though, always too short. I only sleep 6 hours on average according to it.
First two hours awake in the morning is devoted to toddler, which includes feeding him, dressing him, then waiting for 0730 so I can take him to school.
Similar schedule when he returns.
Hopefully when he's older things will be easier in the morning.
Actually I'll go further and say most of our work is a net negative for society. Ads are just psychological manipulation to trigger feelings of jealously and greed. Or producing new mixed plastic silicon junk with a 3-year supported software stack but could run for a decade but then millennia in the trash dump. PFAs in all our water supplies.
Okay even more demotivated now.
His time outside of work is undoubtedly much more free and dedicated to recharging than the one of the guy that has to do chores on the weekend and has effectively barely any rest.
Another huge factor is being able to avoid external stressors which are what really drain people and cause burnout I think, having bad co-workers or manager, health issues, family issues, etc. is a killer and will impact your focus drastically. Big difference between working long hours because you are having fun versus working long hours because a boss is breathing down your neck and you'll be fired if you don't finish something in a few weeks
Carmack is also in a favorable position where he's basically always been able to choose only projects he's passionate about for work, so he can't really see the perspective of somebody being forced to work on something pointless by their boss
my take from his comment was that even when you are too mentally drained to write code or something similarly demanding, you could still do stuff like meetings, responding to emails, getting feedback from customers, planning stuff you will code when mentally fresh, etc. So the critical thing is to make sure you can focus on valuable stuff when you are at your best and try to save the other stuff for later
Doesn't matter how much I love an activity I can hardly do it all time for more than few days.
This is stuff most people would call "work" because it does take effort, it makes me a better developer and much of it ties somewhat directly into problems I'm facing at work. But for me it's winding down after work, and recharging for the next day.
Sometimes I have so much to do at work that I need to just read fiction or play around in the darkroom to relax. But this is not the norm -- it's happened twice in the last decade, and lasted for about a month.
So for the question of how many days I can do it? On average 1795.
Considering just the general area of IT, maybe 80 %? I get to do product development which is my interest, but there are also many things which I would like to be different, like purpose of product, organisational size, leadership philosophies, etc.
Now -- why do you ask?
I can work all waking hours on passion projects (including the boring grind - not just the infatuation and ideation phase) as long as it's self directed. Finding work opportunities that aren't orthogonal to long term areas of interest and don't feel like accumulating useless experience and constructing a parallel career is hard.
Ok but you're literally describing a burnout cycle. Some people would prefer to just skip that part and have a completely sustainable working pace.
I can work 16 hour days also, but I'm still dealing with a good portion of that at a seriously degraded mental state. At the end, I'll be making the dumbest mistakes, and it's questionable if that time is even useful.
Athletes do it best I think. They have their cycles of sport, training and recovery. They know their limits. They know their optimum.
I mean getting exercise is definitely good for you and in a choice between too much and too little I think you're better off overdoing it, but just constantly burning your metabolism at full steam seems to age you faster, couple that with the impact caloric deficit is supposed to have on aging and at least in my mind there's a pretty clear connection between the two.
First of all, a healthy body is very good at adaptation, i.e. if properly trained, your bones, muscles and other tissues get thicker and less prone to tearing, breakage etc.
Second, you will be surprised at how much pressure could daily activities put on your tissues, e.g. your vertabrae disks get higher pressure when you are wobbly sitting than standing even with some additional load. And in my experience people who train their body for extreme conditions have less problems in their elderly than people who never trained much at all.
And as you've noticed, most sportspeople have troubles with their serious traumas, not due to routine trainings. Plus of course this traumatization level varies from sport to sport.
In this friends case it was the NFL part that caused the damage. Not the fitness part.
I once did a boxing class. The day we did drills with with those boxing pads that require 2 hands to hold up, my head was throbbing for the rest of the day. Tried it again and same thing. Then I quit. Clearly I cannot take a serious punch.
I know several pro swimmers though and haven't heard of any serious issues there, so i guess it's from the impacts and constant running.
Me, like the good nerd, I am developed back problems instead
Please stop projecting your ideal work life onto other people.
Mental preferences are endlessly complex. It’s not ok to assume everyone has your preference and can work the same hours and way you do. It’s also not ok to project that towards some work / life balance that assumes things outside work are primary drivers in everyone’s lives.
Some people derive their main satisfaction in life from the fruit of their work. That’s ok too.
I'm a coder by trade, but I've never really spent lots of personal time coding, like most of the really good coders I know. That's just not fun for me.
On the other hand, I do sometimes spend many personal hours making spreadsheets for fun. I need to figure out how to get paid for that.
Or don't. Monetizing your leisure activity might well turn it into Just More Work that drains and stresses. Speaking for myself, I needed zero-stakes activities as a pressure relief valve when I was doing the corporate job, or I'd end up relying to chemicals to simulate that relaxation and get back to baseline. Benzos rot your brain, booze makes you fat; pottering in the ham shack does neither.
BUT HE SHOULD!
One of his first jobs was a soul crushing dev work when they had to write X random PC utilities every Y week for some monthly subscription thingy. You know what he did? He started slacking like crazy at work so he could work on game development with his bodies at home. Using company equipment he more or less stole from work.
(I think he was sued for this, and then repeated it many years later and was sued by Facebook)
So technically, he worked shorter hours. He just didn't tell his boss.
Source: https://www.amazon.com/Masters-Doom-Created-Transformed-Cult...
Most people doing what he did would get so fired so quickly... yet when everbody's favorie guy does it...
I can easily work my day job, go to the gym and give it my best, and then come back home and fire up my own project if I’m generally feeling happy.
If I’m stressed it can lead to some other mental health issues and then even my day job is effected.
I think anyone can do this if they were allowed to structure their work the way they want and work on the things they want to. Then we’d all be Carmacks in our chosen field. But we aren’t all so lucky.
But is there context switching? I can probably do 12hrs of X, but if it's 8hrs of X + 4hrs of Y, X and Y being things I enjoy and want to do very much, I don't think I'd have the wherewithal to switch to Y after 8hrs of X. 12 hrs of X: you're already in the groove, you have the context, you're working toward a goal in a continuum. 4hrs of Y, you have to spend activation energy, fiddle a bit with finding where you left off, what the problem space was, before you get in the groove. That take-off alone will sap probably an hour. You can do it, but attended with all our human foibles, are you going to mentally decide you're going to start Y, after 8hrs of X?
There’s also a lot of other commentary on his capabilities outside of that one account, so it seems likely to be true imo.
It's John Carmack. There's nothing typical about him, he's Kristy Hawkins tier atypical.
It's like asking superman how much weight we should be able to lift. Doesn't apply to most average folks.
Honestly he sounds a bit narcissistic though. Especially in context. It's hilarious that I say that because I have a LOT of respect for him and iD software producing OpenGL games when everyone else was busy licking Microsoft's DirectX boots for that sweet sweet 24/7 dedicated Microsoft support and accomodation that Apple and the Linux community were never known for lol.
At the end of the day, you can be an astronaut or a surgeon or whatever and sure, you'll have your crazy weeks, but you'll also have a life outside of work. If they can live a normal life, IDK why I'd want to go working "passionate" long hours for a company that makes video games.
Meanwhile someone who is a salaried worker is often not rewarded at all for doing any additional work. Often not even with paid overtime. If you finish a task fast you will get another task, not a promotion. The cynical take is that the managers (or business owners) cannot promote their key employees, because who will then do all the work on time?
In fact if the managers have a "star" and two "potatoes" they will usually reward the star with more work. Often without any noticable change in pay. Maybe some small bonus. But that bonus is often nothing when compared to real contribution. If you did 200% more work than the 2 potatoes you will oftenbget a 15% higher bonus. What is simply not worth it.
Even if you are a builder who likes to build - you are screwed. Most orgs dont even try to recognize their key talent. They dont know who pushes the company forward (apart from sales teams where it is relatively easy to indentify who sells more, but it doesnt often work that way - best sales people are those who open blue oceans - and I only saw that working once).
I actually agree with him that people who spend less hours will probably be less productive.
But as someone who switched jobs and had so far 40 half-hour meet and greet calls and who now sits for 6 hours per day in "alignment calls" I wonder when I am supposed yo do any actual work. Im a "builder" but the organization does not give me time to build - constant distractions, constant "update calls" - and when I finally have 2 free hours my energy levels are drained by the useless stuff.
So those books that say that those big managers, leaders, builders wake up at 4am to do undistracted work - I understand. Or that they sit until late hours to actually do something, or even write emails in the evenings. In the (very good) book "Master's of doom" we could read that Carmac slept at the office. But at the end of the day he got millions from that. A typical salaried person might get maybe 50% better bonus for spending your life in the office. So why do that? You waste a lot of hours for your life (say 2 hours per day) to get a bonus worth 0,5 of your monhly salary? One could calculate earnings per hour and come to a conclusion it is not worth it. You are already paid what you are paid, the cynical view is do just enough to keep your spot and then optimize for leaving work after 8 hours and doing home stuff at work (buying stuff, reading news..).
The whole corporate reaward structure does not reward you for work. It rewards you gor visibility.
On a side note: the japanese who stay at work for 12 hours per day seem to mostly sit there, do chores, online shopping, sleep. I actually believe that they make maybe 5 hours if work, but are available (what of course is useful) for 12. If they sat at work for 8 hours, would they have a productive 4 or 6 hours?
Most people arent savants like Carmac who are productive for 8 hours in an 8 hour job. Carmac was in an undistracted "builder mode / rhytm" for months. In my corporate envitonments it is a good thing if I can get undistracted 2 hours.
Also most people arent rewarded adequatly for contributing more. If the company isnt yours or if you arent getting a % bonus, if you work long hours you will just have a shitty life. (Many poor people have a shitty life too obviously but with even less money)
Fuck at my new org I'm even double booked on 2 calls at the same time. Do you think I contributing much to any?
Why the whole org cant setup 2 hours with no distraction? Would everyone ignore it? Would many "people managers" who do nothing but distract have nothing to do? In addition reality is that lots of workers need someone standing behind them with a deadline / stick to do make them do work.
I maybe should start a blog, or read a book. But would everyone even want to read those thoughts and rants
Most of us don’t compare to him lol.
I disagree with Carmack that most jobs have enough different types of work that you can always find something you're not already burnt out on. That's one thing I think he's missing.
But if you figure out what things actually nourish or recharge you and which drain you (which may not be what you think at all and can take some effort and time to figure out), I'd hope you aren't left in the Reddit-swiping vegetative state quite so much! That's another thing I think he's missing: his work was actually nourishing for him, which isn't true for everyone. That's why in some ways being obsessive is "easier", you have a self-recharging activity and don't have to figure that out like everyone else!
I’m exactly like this too. I enjoy my work way more than average, but depending on the day I have between 6 and 12 (median 7) focused hours to do work before my brain sort of grinds to a halt. But when I get home, if I unwind mindfully and don’t get trapped on HN or YouTube, I can go meet some friends for dinner or go to the climbing gym, and that feels energizing instead of draining.
Who is even in the Carmack tier of programmers? Like maybe 3-4 other people ever?
Yes.
What he is saying, is that success has a price. If you want to achieve something great, you need to work your ass off (well, unless you're inheriting a fortune or some other unusual situations). When you work in a job where giving your best doesn't make much difference - that may be not obvious. But if you are working towards meaningful, it does - a huge one.
There's an obvious answer here being that he's the John Carmack.
I do agree with the "go to the gym" part of his spiel.
I need some time to recover to get my brain functioning again. When I finish my 8 to 4 work day of average intensity (as in not exceptionally stressful or busy), WFH I'm with my kids, there are a lot of things I can't do until I have some rest. You mention hangover, perhaps. Is more like waking up after only sleeping 4 hours.
When the kids are on bed and the house jobs are done, say 9pm I can have a shower and I may be 80% to do any intellectual activity. Sometimes, as you say, may be watching a series or something like that; definitely not rockets.
It's pretty easy in my experience to work long hours on things that are intellectually engaging. It's the stuff which is frustrating and causes stress/burnout that is hard to work on all the time. I could easily spend 50 hours a week building a compiler but not 50 hours a week writing google docs, sitting in meetings, and talking to people - that would kill me.
No, he doesn't. Right after the quote you have:
> No, it just means that focusing on a single thing for an extended period of time is challenging.
YMMV I guess, but I'd be surprised if anyone's programming neurons are replenished by memes. Maybe by a nice movie.
Mental faculties are like muscle in that they get tired and need rest. A difference is that it's easy to sense how tired muscles are and hard to sense how tired the mind is.
Because I haven't done an RCT, there are potential confounds. Perhaps I'm more likely to reddit (vs go outside) when I'm lower on energy to begin with. And there's a lot of noise, and the metrics are subjective.
Also: relaxing takes some practice. One can sit in a beautiful place with spa music playing and still have one's mind buzzing, so it wouldn't be restorative. Taking a proper mental rest took me years to get good at.
Another caveat: "mental energy" is a metaphor that may not exactly correspond to something physical like neuron ATP levels or whatever. And there are many parts of the brain, and different activities use different subsets, so activities overlap in strange ways. Still, as far as self-cognitive-science goes, I'm relatively confident in this observation.
Carmack normal, light, workweek is 6 days working 10 hours a day, minimum.
it's him :)
It's great that John is this monster endurance tech athlete with amazing results, but in the same way that the dude that ran a 50k or 100k last weekend might not be the best person to emulate for you, John probably doesn't align with what makes sense for 99.9% of the world's tech population.
Shorter work weeks make sense for almost everyone working in tech. I'd put in more 9s, non-ironically, but it's a bad look.
Since the post is tagged 2016, I think it is also more likely than not that John would agree with this now; it's very possible that he'd also agree with it then, but I didn't go beyond the linked comment.
After a few hours (5ish) of deep work, I can't think straight, and start overthinking problems. I could probably train myself to go longer, but likely not that much longer. So I wonder if there is a genetic basis to that.
(Although even if there is, I doubt people like John Carmack would understand)
Even the slightest adjustment to your liking can increase your productivity. Thats why people working from home, in a nice environment are more productive than those in a forced environment. Even cattle produce more milk when they are in an environment they like.
If I have a bunch of tasks that are part of something interesting and worthwhile to do, and I don't need to meet with people to get them done, I can hang out and work on those tasks for 14 hours no problem. I can keep doing that every day for a really long time too, I don't get burned out.
BUT in the real world that's almost never the case. That's how it worked when I was making unsuccessful SaaS business attempts and drawing down my savings. Now that I'm back in Silicon Valley working for the FANGMAN on a tiny piece of His next attempt at world domination, I get exhausted and burned out pretty quick. I've got maybe 4 good hours of concentrated effort in me per day, it's a struggle to drag myself into the office, the week just crawls by and the weekend is gone in a flash..
It helps to disconnect from whatever it is the company is doing and value your time and expertise more. The success of whatever you're working on is not a reflection of you or your skills. Oh that experiment didn't work? That new product feature flopped? Meh, I'm paid by the hour to execute my expertise at my comfortable pace toward their goal regardless of how realistic or achievable it is. Embrace the jira ticket monkey mindset. Don't try to work around the org inefficiencies, embrace and amplify them. Oh I need to wait for some indeterminate time for access/permission? Blocked by another team? Scheduled for stupid meetings sprinkled through the day such that you can't get a proper maker's schedule[1]? The work isn't structured well? The priorities change frequently enough for whiplash? I get paid regardless. So what if my productivity or output is low due to their nonsense? Disconnecting mentally really helps prevent the exhaustion and burnout. Don't try to do the PO's/PM's/Boss' job. It's their money to waste, their dumb decisions to make, and none of it is your concern.
At least for me, a healthy dose of perspective makes it much easier to go into the office; enjoy the amenities, free feed, and getting some social time in. The weather has been fantastic the last few weeks and I've been cycling into work. I save my quality mental focus for other things, including keeping an eye out for gigs and opportunities where it makes sense to mentally connect.
https://pennneuroknow.com/2019/09/03/the-genetics-behind-sho...
ADHD is likely partly genetic. Savant syndrome is maybe genetic or at least acquired early.
Just requiring less sleep is still a huge advantage though.
He completely agreed with his 2016 self in the Lex Fridman podcast he did last year.
JC: And you can't really keep working forever. After a while you just stop being as capable. For instance after 13 hours, my output starts to drop.
Hahaha. Fucking brilliant mate.
But really, in the end, there's no reason for all this back and forth waffling. It's possible, he's shown us. If you prioritize it maybe it's worth a shot. If you don't, then don't.
But the reality is you prioritize what you do. Maybe you prioritize HN or Reddit. Who can tell. In the end, no one else needs to be convinced - only you at the moment.
About the only great sadness is low agency - where people believe that they can't control anything.
If you want to be good, achieve, and be able to compete, you will have to work your ass off. He's just right, and if you think he's not and you want to achieve something then you will learn some harsh lessons.
On the other hand, should everyone aim at being a competitive engineer? No. There's plenty of other things that life can offer.
But in America, what's the default? Making people work as much as possible. Cross the Atlantic pond and your mind will be blown at how many holidays per year workers get.
This is not new either. Top Academia has been like this for a century. I’m not completely sure if this is a good or a bad thing. Perhaps it’s a necessity. Maybe it’s not. But it is universal.
Also unless you run brain scans and video feeds of someone and their screen 24/7 you don’t really know the hours they do even if they are in their office chair.
IME most people don't know how many hours they actually worked vs hours they were in their chair. Most folks also overestimate their productivity from "multi-tasking", despite the overwhelming research showing productivity losses.
It would be hard to quantify, but it could be done
There are different arguments for "Folks should be allowed more time off, e.g. walk the dog" and "Folks can multi-task while working, e.g. walk the dog and talk on conference calls."
My argument (and I think your comment) was related to the latter, that human beings are more likely to overestimate their productivity, which various studies have shown.
Terence Tao on hard work[1]: "One needs to do a serious amount of reading and writing, and not just thinking, in order to get anywhere serious in mathematics; contrary to public opinion, mathematical breakthroughs are not powered solely (or even primarily) by “Eureka” moments of genius, but are in fact largely a product of hard work, directed of course by experience and intuition. (See also “the cult of genius“.)"
Computer Scientest who developed error correction codes Richard Hamming said something like "I stormed into the supervisor's office and demanded to know how John Tukey could be the same age as me and know so much. 'You would be surprised how much you'd know if you worked as hard as he works' said the supervisor. I slunk out of the office and since then tried to work harder, and it helped me know a lot more".
Nobel Prize winning physicist Paul Dirac, from Wikipedia: "Dirac himself wrote in his diary during his postgraduate years that he concentrated solely on his research, and stopped only on Sunday when he took long strolls alone." and later in his life "Korean physicist, Y. S. Kim, who met and was influenced by Dirac, also says: "It is quite fortunate for the physics community that Manci [Mrs Dirac] took good care of our respected Paul A. M. Dirac. Dirac published eleven papers during the period 1939–46. Dirac was able to maintain his normal research productivity only because Manci was in charge of everything else".
Nobel Prize winning physicist Gerard 't Hooft[2] on learning physics: "You won’t get your Nobel Prize for free, and remember, all of this together takes our students at least 5 years of intense study (at least one reader was surprised at this statement, saying that (s)he would never master this in 5 years; indeed, I am addressing people who plan to spend most of their time to this study)"
> "But in America, what's the default? Making people work as much as possible. Cross the Atlantic pond and your mind will be blown at how many holidays per year workers get."
And how much less money they/we earn. Americans in tech scoff at the idea of doing a Tier 1 helpdesk job because it's not enough money to get out of bed for, when it's paying almost double the average UK household income.
Price's Law[1]: "Derek de Solla Price, a British physicist, historian of science, and information scientist, discovered something about his peers in academia. He noticed that there were always a handful of people who dominated the publications within a subject. Price recognized a pattern which was later named after him.
50% of the work is done by the square root of the total number of people who participate in the work.
Only a handful of people produce half of the results in any given field or company. You may have observed this phenomena throughout your experiences in life. You are working on a team, and there are the superstars who do most of the work or seem to produce most of the outcomes and then there is everyone else."
[1] https://expressingthegeniuswithin.com/prices-law-and-how-it-...
And those researchers (at least those I know personally) get health issues due to the complete asinine work load. Including a well respected professor just getting straight up heart problems every time he would get onto his old campus.
We should seriously reconsider what we glorify in academia before it gets to late.
Now I'm old, with teenage kids, and a more managerial (but still self-employed) kind of job... well let's just say after spending most of the day in MS Word, I bailed from the coworking space at 3pm... and fell asleep on my couch at 4.
If I find myself back in my happy place (coding) then I am still able to code for much longer hours, but I definitely notice my fatigue levels rising, and this is definitely reflected in the quality of my work.
I suspect the vast majority of working people are not doing jobs which are as fulfilling as coding is to me, and many probably wish they could go home and crash on the couch at 4pm. Shorter working hours will benefit them.
Given the rising levels of inequality, it's also an easy form of redistribution, and I was a little disappointed that Carmack didn't address that, but admittedly it wasn't really the thrust of his post.
To extend your metaphor, there's a big difference between doing 10k in a swamp vs. 20k on a track.
Individual freedom seems to be in the mouth of all millionaires that can afford that freedom. Most people has to work to live and their freedom of choice ends there. And it is already forbidden in most countries to "work as many hours as you want" because is the only way to avoid a race to the bottom were everybody, except the rich, suffer.
This is a clear example of bias and that the fact that a guy is talented in one thing does not make him be able to understand a different one.
Remember that Carmack is in the US, where this is not forbidden.
i don’t understand your race to the bottom argument.
Look at work culture in the United States or parts of Asia, where the goal is to extract as much production out of the workers as possible and if it grinds them to dust, that's their own personal failing and you will just swap out the faulty cog for a fresh one.
It gets absurd when you look at Japan's performative long hours. It's not even financially beneficial by that point.
Being able to voluntarily work more than 40h/week also means being able to be voluntold to work more than 40h/week.
(See e.g. US work ethics/protestant work culture.)
There isn't one single culture here. Plenty of cultures not just permit it, they expect it.
Can this really be prevented anywhere? That would be appalling. Reminds me of "Harrison Bergeron" (Vonnegut short story).
If you are born in America, then it is possible in your lifetime if you don't enslave yourself to vice.
I dont disagree that its possible! But i see the need for the people to band together and get some of that freedom through some sort of rule setting
If your parents are rich and you get some of that as an adult, you simply won't have to work, have strategy, and won't need as much discipline. You might not need these things at all, at least not on the same level as anyone poor. Or heck, you won't need as much as anyone mildly comfortable. Setbacks won't even affect you the same way, and you won't even have some of them. You won't risk losing your home because you had to miss work to get your car fixed, for example, both because your job allows for you to miss work and get paid and because you aren't driving those sorts of cars.
Not spending $5 gambling on the lottery (a vice!) isn't going to get you financial freedom, nor is avoiding drinking a couple times a month. If you are born in America and born poor, it is very unlikely that you'll be able to do anything but work your life away and barely make it. That sort of mobility - the sort folks site with the 'American dream' - simply isn't a thing. You don't work your way out of poverty: You luck your way out. Having rich parents is one of the biggest factors in whether or not you get this freedom in life.
Ah, yes. Only work will set you free. What a reasonable statement.
It’s impossible to regulate how much software engineers work. No country has bureaucrats making sure you’re not sitting at home on your laptop writing code at 2 in the morning.
One time a bug bothered me to no end, I kept thinking about it all the time. I then sat down at 10pm and started debugging / tinkering. I finally solved the issue some time that night and got back to work the next day, reporting my success to the team. Great.
While it was a helpful fix for the team it wasn't super important. After I reflected some of this process, I realized that it wasn't my curiosity or passion that was driving me. It was a bad relationship with work. I was still quite new and I wanted to prove myself - this pressure is what drove me.
My endeavor brought next to no personal advantage, rather it was a detriment. I spent my free time, my sleep even, to fix a mediocre bug which I simply could have done the next day. Even if I took two or three days, no bottom line would have been affected. Barely anyone would have bothered, asked or cared. So what's left was some idea of opportunity cost - since the bug was fixed I was now free for other work. But the value of that is also hypothetical!
In the end, I think working for someone else, especially a generic corporation, is way different from personal projects or startup products that you are passionate about and really deeply care that it succeeds. I will reliably perform my duties and try to be efficient at it, but I will NEVER let big corpos take away time from my life again just to improve some managers standing or bonus.
You can definitely find a good balance between fulfilling your position at or above expectations while respecting your personal life and health. I do not hesitate to take sick days, I prioritize my family and friends. Working 4 days per week has been show to drastically reduce sick days and other issues so while it might seem counterintuitive to some, I really believe that it's actually beneficial for everyone.
Note: I typically have a weird productivity surge between sunset and 2am that never gets used for work, obviously. Something about the early darkness triggers my mind...
Absolutely true.
> I think most people excited by these articles are confusing not being aligned with their job’s goals with questions of effectiveness. If you don’t want to work, and don’t really care about your work, less hours for the same pay sounds great! If you personally care about what you are doing, you don’t stop at 40 hours a week because you think it is optimal for the work, but rather because you are balancing it against something else that you find equally important. Which is fine.
And this is really the key to the whole shorter work week argument. I agree with John; if you are running your own company or initiative in an area you are passionate about, the 40 hour week question probably doesn't even dawn on you. Why would you want to work less to achieve a goal you are ambitious to reach? If anything you are working more because you enjoy it and want to see more progress more quickly.
But most people working a typical job (even in tech) are not in a position to care deeply about their work and its outcomes - why that's the case is a separate discussion and probably differs person-to-person. A good amount of those people might even be working on things during those 40 hours that are a poor use of their individual time due to bad management, bureaucracy, inability to work on things they want to, etc. These people are not able to work 40+ hours things that feel or are as important as other things in their life such as side projects, family, exercise, etc. And so the 5 day, 40 hour workweek feels incompatible with their life.
Perhaps most people - after looking at their paystub - are acutely aware that their employer doesn't deeply care about them. In my experience, there is a direct link between how much effort I put in going above and beyond in my work and how much higher (or lower) than average my salary was - with an inverse experience multiplier. I put in lot's of unrewarded effort fresh out of school. I didn't know any better, and probably used work to fill up down-time
I hope I am misinterpreting this. It's been shown scientifically time and time again with actual data that this is the case [1, World Economic Forum] - denying this or being sarcastic about it seems really disingenuous and ideology-driven to me.
[1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2023/03/surprising-benefits-f...
In principle they can just not do those particular jobs. In practice most "careers" expect "full" time.
Some fields are inherently quite flexible, like some doctors/dentists can decide to not schedule anything for a week.
In the linked comment JC said "I am deeply appalled at the thought of trading away individual freedom of action and additional value in the world for that goal."
But the point is that freedom is ephemeral. The world has all sorts of incentives that promote race-to-the-bottom behaviors (cf. https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/Meditations-On-Moloch )
In the good ol' days at least a family might likely have the mom at home with the kids even if dad gave blood to Moloch every day.
I would be more than happy to listen to John talk about what works for him and strategies that he finds effective. But hearing him try and critique articles targeted at the average person or average developer or even average 10x developer... like... Does he not understand how different other people's lives are than his? It reminds me of when you hear politicians try and talk about the struggles of regular people. It is so cringe.
I find this mindset easy to replicate when working on my personal projects. Effectiveness may drop a bit after 1am for obvious reasons, but otherwise any hour is much like another.
The problem comes when trying to get yourself to do something that you don’t really want to do, or when you need to deal with the umpteenth time someone broke the same system due to the same mistake or the third discussion in a day where people miss the obvious solution. You can only have so much of that in a day before you mentally check out.
1. Do you have enough ownership to at least sit at the table when it's decided what exactly you work on and how you do it? Can you affect strategy, goals, priorities, timelines and design?
2. Do you reap at least part of the reward (financial, appreciation, status)? Does it feel fair compared to what others get out of it based on their contribution?
3. Does the actual day to day work involve sufficient things that energise you, and few enough things that drain you? Do you have the power to delegate the latter to at least some degree?
I've never met an employee who can answer all of these with yes, but they're crucial for getting things done in a truly motivated and successful fashion, at least for me. Employers don't typically give up more power/rewards than they feel they have to, though.
Ever since I went independent, I have a lot of this. That power over my own work and fortune is a phenomenal motivator, and I really enjoy work these days. I know I can work less if I feel like it, it's my decision. I can only imagine how much _more_ of this Carmack has, being rich, successful and highly respected from a young age. I don't know him, but I'd give him the benefit of the doubt and say he must honestly have no idea what it's like to not have that.
You could literally ask your taxi driver for their thoughts and it would be as helpful.
I prefer to see what the outcomes are from real-world experiments which to date are showing that shorter work weeks can be effective in many situations.
...in software engineering. But then he steers into talk about menial jobs. I worked minimum wage jobs for over a decade before I got an app published. I rather doubt Carmack worked a manual job for very long but perhaps someone can correct me.
And I know he is not making a scientific claim because he is not done any research or has any background in this field. So his opinion does have weight. The same weight as literally any other random person on this planet.
At some point he crashes but it’s not at 40hrs.
Is there variance in how long people can work without degraded performance? Of course. But it still degrades for most people.
And rightfully so. Ask anyone who's been through the grind of a startup; for knowledge workers, pulling 80 hour weeks does get shit done faster than working 35 hour weeks. To say otherwise is wishful thinking.
But yes, he was responding specifically to a comment about his work ethic as described Masters of Doom. It's much different when you are working in a small team, on a project you're passionate about, which will make you an enormous amount of money if it succeeds.
Should you put in 80 hour weeks when you are FAANG employee #35,714? Probably not, unless you see some strategic career reason, i.e. project is public and high-profile which you can then leverage to get a job at a competitor for 50% raise, etc.
If you put in 80 hour weeks as FAANG employee #35,714, would you accomplish more? Absolutely. Would your personal life suffer? Absolutely.
sure in the short run that holds true. its just not sustainable. most people will burn out spectacularly after a few months of this and prolly leave the industry entirely.
I do think that most people won't produce more (of the same quality) working 80 hours/wk unless they are exceptionally motivated.
However, with the right motivation, people will. I'm guessing that what that motivation looks like varies from person to person. For me, it's when I'm starting my own venture.
I'm willing to sacrifice to such an extreme degree for that. I cannot imagine any other company being able to come up with sufficient motivation to make it possible for me to work productively 80 hours/week, though. It's not a matter of me being willing to do it, it's a matter that I wouldn't be able to do it.
The question is do you have more work done after 35+X hours than you did at 35?
If not, what were the X hours actually doing? Decompiling?
When you burn out, you no longer get 5-10 hours of focus per week; that time goes to recovery from last week.
The 5 day week is 8am to 10pm which is just insane while I could probably do seven days for maybe a month, I definitely couldn't sustain this for fifteen years.
Even when I had a full time job and a PhD to finish, I rarely went over 60 so super curious how you accomplished this.
As an older engineer I find Carmack's observations interesting and quite accurate.
It had been more than 20 years since Carmack pulled an all nighter working on Doom, and he’s been coasting along ever since.
https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html
"Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest. Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works ten percent more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity - it is very much like compound interest."
The payoff of working more is not linear.
You need to do that? Dang, that sucks. Still "butts in chairs" attitude.
I think you make a good point that it's more complicated than "just stay longer", but I do also agree with GP that there is some kind of compounding interest when it comes to how many hours work. Don't know how it works though.
- If doing some incidental bullshit or chore or otherwise work that I don't like, I struggle to keep focus and am all stressed until I clock out, after which I eventually unwind and calm down;
- If doing something I like, or when I feel I'm making good progress, I'm highly focused and productive, but half-way through start to stress about coming end of work day; in those situations I absolutely do not want to stop working - and if given a chance, I'd continue until I'm done or too tired to continue.
With that in mind, I have mixed feelings towards the idea of a shorter work day. While I'd love to have more personal time, where I can exercise my autonomy, I'd also hate it on those days that I'm making good progress and don't want to stop.
First, it's hard to measure, I wouldn't believe any of the studies I've seen at the moment (good or bad). (BTW I was the one who pushed for a 4-day week at my previous company.)
Second, lots of companies waste a lot of time with meetings. A shorter work week actually doesn't always translate in less work time, it can translate in useless meetings getting trimmed, and in people still working during time off but now being able to work during these days peacefully and focused.
I'm perfectly fine with wanting a work / life balance and choosing a job just for the easy money. There is absolutely nothing wrong with it. 40, 35 hours per week, maybe 30 hours - depending on the country.
But whenever there is a job where the 'productivity' can be directly evaluated - say some parts of finance world, sports, startups, cooking come to mind too - it's crystal clear, that it's people who dedicate their lives to it that accomplish the most. And it's not even close.
Frequently when the team was crunching at work, the result was that people had to bring their personal lives into the work hours in order to be able to actually stay at work longer, whether it meant making personal phone calls (because they couldn't postpone them until home), or even bringing their kids into the office for a few hours before going home. That was not Productive Work Time.
Similarly if someone comes in to work while sick, I don't think you can argue that those 8+ hours spent working with a cold or the flu are going to be at full productivity, and then they probably make their coworkers sick too.
You will undoubtedly find more valuable knowledge the more knowledge you expose yourself to though.
The only way this isn’t true is for people who are lucky to have really good memories.
The conclusion that an article discussing productivity research is secret conspiracy against people who want to work a lot of hours, is a bit mind boggling.
He never suggests he's tried working fewer hours. Have to wonder if the guy is just one of those people incapable of taking a break.
He is a “live to work” person who’s never had to “work to live” since his first couple years when the learning of it was enough to sustain his forward movement.
Sure he has crap work he needs to do, but it’s all in service of what he already cares about. So no cognitive dissonance.
What I think is really at odds in the comments is this: people want to work less and feel like it's ok, but don't feel like it's appropriate to come out and say that.
But that can also be combined with 3 or 4 day work weeks (and not necessarily repeated long weekends, day on day off day on can be good too for some people).
I dont see the hours there:
- say you sleep 8h
- 1h = taking care of your body (shower, toilet, washing hands) for entire day
- 2h eating and eating prep
- 1h lost in random tasks (a curier delivery, feeling an emotion, ...)
you then have 12 hours to handle work and family and sport :D
how less time to put for family per day? 1 hour and the family survives as as family over say 5 years of doing that?
please note that I did not added shopping, paying bills, ... talking with friends...
Sure, I have had 16 hour days that we're worth it. I have also had only 10 hour days banging my head against the same problem for hours only to solve it in 10 minutes in the morning. I experience these diminishing returns on most of my longer days and am lucky enough to know how to identify them and walk away.
I would hope everyone here would agree that Carmack is atypical. I think the real take away from the thread is that you should take time to know yourself, your potential and limits, what you want and what makes you happy, and what it takes to get there. Most of the comments I feel are arguing what the ideal way to work is, which is a farce. Maybe a lot of these comments are fueled from social/cultural/industry pressures telling them they should be a certain kind of engineer. I work in Sweden, and it seems from a work culture standpoint, they are far less interested in squeezing every ounce of value from their employees in comparison to the US. Meanwhile, I'd say they are still very competitive in a software sense, especially in gaming.
Working your ass off makes you more productive, yes, but it comes at a cost. Personal time, family time, etc…
> Given two equally talented people, the one that pursues a goal obsessively, for well over 40 hours a week, is going to achieve more. They might be less happy and healthy, but I’m not even sure about that.
What worked for me and my current partner is being upfront about my career goals and the lengths I was willing to go to achieve them. I’ve now been in a strong relationship for 7+ years which is twice whatever I lasted with other partners who found me sometimes reserving a weekend to work/research a deal killer.
Like, could I make the same money for half the time if I e.g. started my own gig? Maybe. But maybe is not good enough, and with a spouse, kids and a mortgage, I can't afford to test it - it would put my family at too big of a risk.
But sometimes it’s something you can moonlight.
“It’s not that bad” says the guy leaving a trail of women in the wake of his career.
For example, most people’s goal is closer to “work just enough to live comfortably” than they’d like to admit, I suspect.
Not everyone loves work as much.
Having the choice to work more or less is good. We should be compensated for whatever value we provide, measured in a way that agrees between employee and employer (or between market and person/business).
So what's the problem?
I disagree with any top-down pressures to "solve" this tension.
You could argue that many developers are a net-negative for society given that the industry wastes a lot of time building X idea in Y language for every combination of Y.
"Don't be a burden on others" is one of the values I grew up with. Should be a universally good thing IMO.
The amount of social benefits that remain in people’s pockets after the grifters have taken their share are rounding errors compared to say bank bailouts and government subsidies (in the US).
I don’t think being a burden on others is good, but it’s nothing compared to active destruction, which can come with huge force multipliers. Every large organization have high ranked people that are rewarded for their destruction. There are entire industries dedicated to leeching off of honest people, like tax prep and time shares.
Rather than pretending that their latest open source project which is 99% the same as a dozen others is some extraordinary contribution to society.
That is a local optimization that hurts the global output. What is efficient for one individual may be damaging when applied to all society.
Just a theoretical example is that your dedication to work makes you a worse parent, or a non-parent, removing a more knowledgeable, better educated and more healthy human from existing.
Wow, that's a great quote.
There are also tasks that require my full undivided attention where having anything on in the background breaks my flow and just lengthens the task. When my brain power is low, it's often from working on these particular tasks and when it helps to switch over to one of the menial tasks.
I also do find, as he says, that it's good time to take on some experimental/exploratory tasks that may use more creativity and less logical thinking.
Seeing when you're depleted in one area but not in another is incredibly powerful and is a great productivity booster. (Of course, there are definitely times where I just cannot muster any energy and those are times where it helps to just step away from the keyboard.)
So I would like to ask you for a hypothetical allocation of time chunks per day for someone that wants/has a family and a healthy lifestyle (sports, eating healthy...)?
Please include in there: sleeping, cooking, exercising, spending time with your partner and with your kid, paying bills, and making personal decisions.
If the answer is any of these:
- my partner is doing everything
- other people are doing everything else except my work
Then I invite you to think about for whom is this lifestyle then.
I can work for 100 hours in a week and get strictly more done than I did in the first 40, and yet I wouldn't be surprised if a company that required 100-hour weeks from its employees became more effective when they reduced their work week to 40 hours.
Even if I can be more productive working 9 hour days, so what? I did not get born for being productive.
Long workdays also point at bad planning, lack of proper task delegation or plain old overload. Overload is also bad in the sense that it implies a big backlog, and when you have big backlog, important things get not done.
Obviously not everyone finds that lifestyle appealing, and that's fine. But I don't think it's hard to understand why somebody would spend a lot of time on the thing they truly enjoy doing.
Sure. Training for a marathon puts you at risk of injury. That doesn't mean that everyone who runs a marathon has an injury, or that everyone with ambitious running goals should go relax on the beach instead. Ultimately, there is no objective standpoint from which to say that people should choose different goals, because goals are based on personal subjective values.
>Even ancient Greeks already knew that modesty is the way to go.
Perfect example of the appeal to tradition fallacy.
An extreme natural workaholic will have a hard time understanding it.
Yes, in that scenario, the right number of hours to maximize productivity and balance with the other things in life is going to be calculated differently.
But for most people, we are working for an employer. We have nearly no control over what our work will entail. We do not give a single flying rat's behind about that work. We do that work solely because capitalism requires us to do some work, and so we do for survival. In this scenario, the correct number of hours to spend working is as few hours we we can get away with while still drawing a salary.
So the question becomes: what else do you get out of it?
Sometimes that can be learning -- maybe go read stuff that's accessible to you but outside of your typical work area -- but in many jobs that's not really possible.
You nothing. But John, John gets it as share owner. He wants employees to work longer hours because he gets any benefit of it but the employees pay with their health and personal life the price. Externalization is called.
Look at the big tech layoffs earlier this year - they were letting both the cruft and top tier talent go. Is it easy to say you are truly safe where you are at?
No one will remember or care about your title, your salary, or the effort you put into wherever you work. Your next employer will have no insight into any of that at all outside of your interviews; they'll measure your worth on the job unless you are a world class snowflake.
I'm not saying don't continue to learn and excel! But there's more to life than your day job. Spoken as someone who discovered way too late a proper life/work balance.
Human effort is burstable, sort of, but for most people it's taxing to burst up to maximum effort. Apparently this isn't true for Carmack, but I have doubts.
Most people are working jobs they wouldn't necessarily be doing at all if they had some other means of paying the bills. This is who people are talking about when 4 day work weeks come up.
I'm not arguing how much you should or shouldn't work. I'm just pushing back against the non-sense that people actually accomplish more by working less.
Now how about who someone works 4 hours a day, 5 days a week. They are likely productive those 4 hours, and able to sustain that the entire month. So they get 80 hours of productive work done, even though they 'worked less'.
Now those are extremes, but literally working less in this case results in higher productivity in the long run. Now where that point is depends on very many variables (including individual biology, social responsibilities, and type of work). But such a point does exist where working more hours results in less productivity.
I could probably get all my required work done in 3 days if I were incentivized to
Am I the only person appalled by Carmack's apparent privilege here? In an era when a CEO is routinely making 300x the wage of an average worker, and sometimes thousands of times more, giving people the option to work less for the same amount of wage seems like one of the few ways we can force the ultra-rich to give back? No one is forcing people to work 7 hours and they could easily work more if they wanted to, but reducing the minimum amount of toil required seems to be a net benefit to everyone who is not insanely wealthy.
People that want to work 12 hour days should be allowed to.
At the tail end of my 20s, I started to realize that this isn't the case, at least for me. I've always found it hard to get work done because I'm low in industriousness, but that can be overcome with routine, minimizing distractions, and knowing when to switch to easier tasks. I don't really know what my limit is, but it's well over 40 hours.
I wish I had listened to more people like John Carmack when I was younger, because maybe I wouldn't have wasted so much of my time over the past decade.
I find it strange that we would want to optimize everything for growth.
I'm not even speaking from the position of someone who wants to work 80 hours a week to the detriment of family and enriching hobbies: I value those things as well. I can work an above average amount if I take time away from social media and watching YouTube videos and Twitch streams, which are things I feel like I've done in excess.
— doesn’t this depend on the outcome of your work to fight an existential threat? If you fail then going home after 35hrs was exactly the right thing to do (as you’ve optimized for making the most of your remaining time on earth) if your successful then however many hours you spent was worth it.
Surely this entire argument is pointless unless you know the result of the time you spend?
What is being discussed is not "shorter work weeks" but "shorter work days", as many people who do shorter work weeks still work 40 hours a week but do it in less days. It seems that Carmack may actually be in support of that.
Working shorter days is not about maximizing the quantity of work but the quality. It is done when it is undesirable to have any work done that is below a certain quality, or just to increase worker happiness. Many people do their highest quality work after having sufficient rest, and then continue to do well building up context till they are burned out for the day.
It very much depends on the person though as some people gain more relevant short term memory context the longer they have been awake, and are able to create ingenious code in late hours more so than in their morning.
Basically, what it seems Carmack is arguing here is that he wants to get all the possible work out of all employees. Feel free to correct me John if that is not what you mean.
I personally don't find it necessary to extract all possible work from employees, as I respect their free time and personal life. I value happiness of my workers over how much work they get done. Happy workers create better results imo.
Sometimes I have 60 good hours a week in me, some days more or less than average to get there. I’m obsessed with an idea, driven to complete it.
And sometime I’ve barely got a solid 15 hours in me for the week, maybe for multiple weeks at a time. No simple answer for what leads me there, but the rest of my time is spent working on the absolutely more urgent things that can’t wait and then just trying to fill the other hours with things that aren’t completely useless, learning about current tech trends, trying to find something “shiny” to strike my interest that has at least minimal relevance to my field, etc.
I’m sure that averaged out my workplaces have received the value they paid for in my salary, but there’s peaks and valleys. And sometimes that even includes having a “screw it” day where nothing critical has to get done and I need a mental breather, time to clear my head from the day to day.
But that’s just me. Everyone will be different. Trying to make a universal paradigm of optimized productivity is a waste of effort. The best you might get are some general guidelines and enlightened flexibility.
If you want to achieve great things, take his advice. If you want to be happy consider the price he paid for it first.
This isn't really about how productive you are after N hours. It's about how many hours are expected of you.
It's a little disgusting that the only way workers can make a case that reduced demands be placed on them, is by arguing that this would support their employers' interests. The 40 hour workweek was not instituted solely for shareholders' benefit. It was instituted because that's what workers wanted, and they fought for what they wanted, the end. Their interests.
There is work and there is play. If I am "accountable" -- if somebody can smack me for failing, if I need to do it to pay the rent or to fund a retirement -- then it's work. Work demands are pure liabilities. Every rational person seeks to reduce their liabilities.
Once you've met those obligations, that doesn't mean you stop learning or stop accomplishing things. But now you can focus on the things that really seem to matter, that you are really interested in.
This is why people want to reduce their work obligations. Sure, part of it is laziness. Part of the time will be frittered away on YouTube. But some of it will be spent on other, valuable, pursuits.
When I was a kid, I taught myself to program, during summer vacation. Why? Because I didn't have homework.
This is about reducing the amount of time during which you have to do what you're told. This is about human freedom.
Whether productivity, narrowly conceived, goes up or down, does not matter, so long as enough still gets done. Without "enough", the demand will always be for "more, more, more".
If I own a company, I would work for as long as it is needed.
Else, it is just a contract. A company thinks you are replaceable anyway. Do not get fooled. They will replace you within 3-4 weeks.
And you do not own anything of the extra work you are doing, it is the company that will take the credits and the profit.
This guy's (bustervil) comment nails it.
Carmack on the other hands writes from a position of multiple levels of privilege: the privilege of working on stuff he loves, the privilege of having struck gold early, the privilege of being greatly compensated for it, the privilege afforded by this accumulated wealth to be picky about where he works, the privilege of also being compensated in status for it, the privilege in him being able to set or impose the working conditions for himself, and, last but not least, the privilege of being an employeer (or in some cases, a top level employee managing others). He has also been into those kinds of privilege for over 30 years - almost his entire career.
This is so far removed from the actual working conditions for hundreds of millions in the US, that it's no wonder it shows little understanding or empathy. It even misses the very basic fact that the post/studies talk about the average worker, not the very rare case of "Doing what I love, as someone having a say in what's to be done, and in a state of flow with direct improvement in my bottom line based on the success of the product".
It's like asking for pyramid's master architect concern for the working hours and working conditions of those carrying the rocks on their backs (which can always be disposed and replaced anyway - whereas if someone like Carmack gets out of some gig, it makes the tech news, and might even affect the stock of the company).
That’s pretty much what I do. I hit the “enough” on a task because I ran out of brain cycles or just frustration and I go for a walk or pick another task.
Maybe it is the advantage of working from home for a small company but people understand if you’re fried or need to do something else. They know I’ll get it done in the end.
That freedom means I also will be inspired and rush to the computer late at night and have the energy to get something in / done too. Not because they ask me, but because I want to do it.
General Freiherr von Hammerstein-Equord, the present chief of the German Army, has a method of selecting officers...: “I divide my officers into four classes as follows: The clever, the industrious, the lazy, and the stupid. Each officer always possesses two of these qualities.
Those who are clever and industrious I appoint to the General Staff. Use can under certain circumstances be made of those who are stupid and lazy. The man who is clever and lazy qualifies for the highest leadership posts. He has the requisite nerves and the mental clarity for difficult decisions. But whoever is stupid and industrious must be got rid of, for he is too dangerous.”
Carmack clearly falls into the clever and industrious bracket and his perspective is skewed by his own disposition.
The film "2081" based on the short story "Harrison_Bergeron" depicts such a world, where everyone is forced to be equal, at all cost:
1. work is a sustenance, you do it for the money and want to do as little of it as possible since you don't enjoy it. It does not define you.
2. work is a passion, the money is a side effect, and you want to do as much of it as possible because you enjoy it. It defines you.
The whole discussion on where you sit on the subject is based on which camp you see yourself in.
The conclusion being, don't judge people for which side they're on. The cards just landed that way.
He doesn't have to take calls and random meetings in the middle of the day.
He doesn't have to work on boring parts of a project. In fact he is known to completely isolate himself from the project and not really communicate at all for long stretches of time. If you look into the Doom3 codebase you will see that the engine is written in C++ while the renderer is written in C. Carmack worked only on the renderer. He didn't even talk to the rest of the team to use the same programming language. They later retrofitted the C renderer to work with the rest of the C++ codebase.
Think about it? In the situation where you pick the part of the project you work on, you choose the tools, you choose the programming language, the computer that you work on, your own hours, your own arbitrary deadlines which you can ignore without much consequence, you can ignore meetings with everybody else and have the meetings on your own terms if needed, would't you also be more productive, happy, and more motivated to work longer hours?
Also, you take home millions and millions in profits as you are the owner of the business.
1 hour in the right direction is worth an infinity of time in the opposite direction.
So letting your brain rest and melt the direction you should pick is leverage to infinity.
That said, with due respect to his skills; Carmack is also an example of going in the wrong direction; from tick based network, spraycones and headshots, violent games, to energy wasting AI and rockets.
His legacy will not age well unfortunately.
Bring on the downvotes!
...or because we're social creatures and tend to stick to well-established norms, for all sort of reasons (mostly good, not always). 40-hour weeks are arguably a relatively recent norm at that.
Whatever socially established norm we come up with as the number of hours one is typically expected to work in a full-time job, it's not likely to be the maximally-productive number for every worker, and those like Carmack almost certainly can and do achieve more working much longer hours. But there does seem to be good evidence that for larger samples of workers, reducing from a 40-hour week to 32 or similar doesn't have much of a measurable impact on output (which implies productivity per hour worked has actually gone up considerably). And, arguably more importantly, workers that have taken part in such programs generally report improvements in their health, sense of self-worth, "happiness" etc. On that basis I'm definitely in favour of revisiting the expectation that a full-time job is ~40 hours a week, and understanding what can be done to help corporations and employees transition to fewer hours.
I actually think the harder problem is: should we extend the current concept of a weekend to be 3 days, or should we accept that the "3rd" rest day each week is different for everyone. I'm generally in the latter camp (*), for various reasons, but I could persuaded that a 3-day weekend, where a significant % of all workers across all industries (including, e.g. schools) all take the same 3 days off each week, has greater benefits.
* strictly speaking I'm in the camp of moving to a 4.5 day week, whereby every worker is expected to negotiate a half-day they won't be available each week with their employer.
I can work for 4-6 hours and be completely wiped. Equally, in the past I've done ludum dares for 24, I seem to remember once even getting close to 48 hours straight, and at the end I'm full of beans (or more so than you'd expect). Again, obviously interest plays a part here but what is much bigger in my opinion is that I know that at the end of that 48 hours, my work is done. I'm "free". If I were to do 48 hours straight at my office job, I'd still be back in the next day, and the day after, and so on.
If the work has no end, what is the motivation to power through it?
In the 1990s he was one of the most productive people doing what he loved best. And luckily, after only a few years, never had to have a “job”.
For everyone else, there are marginal returns and higher productivity for shorter working hours — even the burger flipper is more productive in a 4 hour shift than an 8 hour shift.
Having the mindset that all your talents are equally available to "corporation you" as they are your employer is a key takeaway from Carmack (and others) I think. Even if you are paid to do things you don't care about, save energy for things you do care about and don't limit yourself by thinking of it as "just a hobby" if you really care about it.
When Carmack had a 9-5 coding job he still made games any way he could. The effort he put into that "work" was what really mattered for his success. If he had the mindset that he should only work for the employer and only 9-5 we'd never have heard of him.
We can't all be Carmack but many of us can do better than spending all our effort on something we don't really care about.
There is some difference in that he was probably doing lots of programming at all the different jobs, rather than an unrelated hobby (maybe not that different than the woodworking analogy though, he began talking about lathing rocket parts a lot), but 40 hours at one place tended to be too boring to him through large parts of his career more than he lets on in that comment, though the AI stuff came later.
There's also a big difference in working on assigned tasks you maybe disagree with vs deciding which tasks are needed, having power of delegation, etc.
I know it's not a popular sentiment, but I've always just merged work and non-work. Found jobs I enjoyed and eventually became part owner in a company. In 20 some odds years of working, I've never hated a job like I read people here seem to, so maybe I did something right.
At the end of the day, research on the general population can really only give us a good baseline default. It won't be perfect for everyone, but actual, tangible research has shown that on average, less hours at work makes things more productive. That should be our default. When (not if) an individual who isn't compatible with the default comes along, we should just make them not work on the default.
Deciding not to do something is consequential too, because Opportunity Cost exists whether you like it or not.
I worked for a little while in a scientific institute. I worked as a programmer but I had to know a bit of the science to do my job. I quickly realised that I would never be truly successful in this field because I just wasn't as into it as others were. For many of the people there the science was their life. Similar to how computers was my life before I worked there. My work could never compete with their passion.
The point of the shorter work week is to stop forcing people to do what they don't want to do for so long.
1. He is disconnected from the reality of the situation he is in where he has had total autonomy of something he loves his whole life and cannot understand the concerns of others who are the backbone of his success.
2. He is disingenuous and needs to be a voice to disuate politicians and corporations from implementing something that would negatively impact his bottom line personally.
I'll leave it up to you to think about but either is quite sad for someone who is in a position of power to reduce the suffering of millions of people by just speaking out.
Kind of like taste in music - find what you like, and don't be that asshole that judges others for their taste.
When you have the viewpoint of the maverick freegunning CEO/main architect, and you have a direct stake at what you do, of course you can switch the tasks up to make everything fresh. After all, no one is going to control you in any way whatsoever.
That does not go for anyone with a well-defined set of responsibilities,placed, say, in an "agile" environment. And besides, working above and beyond your means there just means you get more and more tasks in exchange, nothing else. Yaay?
So yes I’d be as effective with a 30 hour week as a 40 for most jobs. And I totally agree with Carmack: it’s *mostly* a motivational issue. But perhaps that’s a sign I we should just hire more people, pay them 75% to work 30 hour weeks.
A much better question should be: why are there so few for which labor == leisure? Why do we attend and attune ourselves to a system in which labor == leisure is such a scarce set and setting?
It’s also a question of ROI - it may be a lot easier to spend 12 hours a day programming if you’re literally among the 5 best programmers in the world, the same way practicing basketball is probably a lot more fun for LeBron James than it would be for me. “Oh, that was an enjoyable day! I just solved three open problems in computer graphics!” Rather than “Why is the button still not showing padding on the left?”
The goal is not to prevent sone from working and earning more, but making sure that all can earn enough to live while not overworking themselves.
Until it's crunch time then you'll do 12 hours a day 7 days a week and like it. That could just be my bias towards video game companies...
But Carmack is also quite privileged in that he got to work on mostly stuff that he wanted to work on. I bet if we all had that (and knew what we wanted to work on, on top of that).. we would work more hours as a result.
See, that’s the issue. Software jobs have become assembly line overworking grinds.
I don't have any data to prove, but just speaking from the heart and what I see. There is definitely a need to address extreme issues and occurrences, but there is no way to separate wheat from the chaff and the entire movement has taken on weird self-fulfilling ideology.
Worker rights movements today feel less like the worker rights movements pre-2010. The absolute pinnacle of this is r/anti-work. And lots of it on HN unfortunately.
If you're here looking for optimism, there is none to be found. Cynicism everywhere.
news to me. consider the possibility that people who disagree with you loom larger in your mental landscape than they really are.
To a certain point, I find myself agreeing with this more and more. While I still firmly believe that therapy is extremely useful (if nothing else, it's like an impartial 3rd party you can bounce ideas off of), I think that most people saying they didn't have the energy to do $BASIC_TASK_X are choosing to do so, and lying to themselves. I often will not do something because I feel exhausted, but I'm also acutely aware that it is a choice, and I _can_ do it if I must.
I did a career shift into tech in my 30s via getting a Master's in SWE while I was working nights on a weird compressed shift (4x12, 3 days off, 3x12, 4 days off). It was extremely difficult and in no way healthy, but I did it because it needed to be done. It paid off; got a job before graduating. Immediate salary boost and enjoyment of work.
That guy is supposed to speak for general working conditions?
Likely due to frittering away more time on here than he, rather than doing "useful" things.
Sure, there are diminishing returns. And being tired can make a negative impact. But the “actually a 4 day, 8 hour work week is more productive“ claims is completely self serving bullshit.
Just imagine working 4x 8 hour days. Now ask yourself if you can output anything except negative work on that Friday.
Also, the long term impact on my happiness and well-being can take a while to measure.
So when working 8 hours instead of 6, there are 2 additional hours where you accomplish nothing? What are you doing? Also consider that even if you aren’t accomplishing anything it doesnt mean you’re getting less work done.
Like I said I recognize there are diminishing returns. But it doesnt make sense to claim you’re actually getting less done.
If you do 10 work units per hour at 5x6, and you do 6 work units per hour at 5x8 because you're worn out, then 5x6 is more productive.
Your mistake is thinking that the first 6 hours of 5x6 and 5x8 are equally productive. Maybe that’s true. Maybe it isn’t. But to claim that it definitely is and anyone who thinks otherwise doesn’t have common sense is just silly.
Edit: to further clarify, are you claiming that 5x10 is definitely more productive than 5x8? What about 5x16? What about 5x24. Or 7x24? Your confidence that you’re definitely right that 5x8 is better than 5x6 makes me wonder where you know the ideal line is and how you know that.
If you work 6 hours a day and produce 10 work units, does working an additional 2 hours really just reduce your previous work output 40%?
Day 1: 16 hours, 16 work units Day 300: 16 hours, 2 work units
Burnout comes in when your pace is unsustainable. We are debating where the sweet spot is. Maybe it's 8 hours a day for you. Maybe it's 10 for Carmack. Maybe it's 6 for me. I don't know, but I doubt it's as obvious or linear as you seem to be thinking.
Why is 40 some magical number to productivity? What if 40 hours leads people to padding out their day with extra bullshit like meetings or needless admin that ends up sucking away more of the time they could spend on their actual work than if they never had to pad things out by only working 32 hours?
For transparency I live in [redacted] where the standard work week is 35 hours. Also I've never found the [redacted] with their 35 hour work week are less productive than our friends in Asia with 45+ hour work weeks. Regardless of time worked the productivity output is roughly the same for any given week.
Absolutely. Because all you have to do is not produce negative work beyond 40 hours. You can literally do nothing.
As I said, there is a balance to be struck and diminishing returns are a real thing. But in order for a 4 day work week to be more productive than a 5 day work week then that means your work output on the 5th day is negative.
You are assuming equal productivity (per working hour) in both scenarios. However, it just might be that the worker who just came off a 3-day weekend, and knows they only have to work for 4 days before their next break, will be more productive per hour than someone who just came off a 2-day weekend, and who knows they will need to work for five days before their next break.
Basically, you are assuming that people are robots and get a certain amount of work done per hour regardless of circumstances.
Do you not find yourself more mentally and physically fatigued at ~35 hours compared to ~25 into the work week?
When do you do your best work? At the start of the work week? Middle? End? Do you feel you do better work after you've had more down time to let your brain "decompress" or whatever you want to call it?
As far as I can tell we stumbled into the ~40 hour work week a long time ago due to physical exhaustion and that exhaustion led to more mistakes and productivity impact due to assembly lines being held up to correct those mistakes, etc.
This makes sense to me and seems like a pretty understandable and reasonable upper limit when it comes to physical jobs such as assembly lines and such.
Why do we just assume that ~40 hours transfers over to knowledge worker jobs? We all know how mentally fatiguing it is after several hours of debugging a tricky issue or trying to design a modern scalable architecture.
Whereas a mistake on an assembly line from a fatigued worker at 40+ hours into the week may put the assembly line out of action for a few hours it that is usually it for the negative impact.
Mistakes in a platform design or a silly bug can easily lead to constant productivity impact and huge costs down the road if that mistake makes it into production. We see it all the time with technical debt.
In your opinion how many hours per working week strikes your balance? How did you get to this number and do you think it is specific to you or more of a general figure that should be the standard?
> If you don’t want to work, and don’t really care about your work, less hours for the same pay sounds great!
When I look at that diverging productivity/compensation curve I wonder how workers in this country were so comprehensively subdued.
If you have completely misaligned economic incentives you should expect misaligned performance from your employees. A founder or executive stands to reap so much more from their effort. Expecting someone to give up large amounts of their time in the prime of their life for mediocre pay on a project that they have little to no agency over is crazy.
It amazes me how angry capitalists get when the employees act like capitalists.
I want to hear what Carmack's wife and kids think.
There's definitely a trade off... that he doesn't acknowledge that indicates to me that his own priorities entirely involve work.
Unclear how relevant this is given it's age but it's the closest public information you'll find.
[1]https://www.notablebiographies.com/news/A-Ca/Carmack-John.ht...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2012/feb/01/top-fiv...
>work should only be enough to bring food and shelter to home
What if you take the thing you love doing and make it your life's work?
But at 41 years old, my priorities have changed. I still get super excited by tech, that's why I advise startups in exchange of equity (so basically for free) and my day job is pretty neat as well (I play with ML, NLP, GPT and other AI technologies) .
But long gone are my days of working 10+ day hours. I sincerely prefer other way less technical stuff in life. I'm visiting my parents quite often, and enjoy spending a lot of time with my wife and kids.
Maybe my previous comment sounded very authoritative, but I just meant to convey my point of view. I have friends who have been working on their startups (as CEOs) like crazy for more than a decade, and they seem to like it.
Personally I just cant see myself wishing I had worked more in my deathbed. Specially for other people LOL. Naaah ,as I've grown older, I've learned to appreciate more the "earthly" things in my life.
FWIW, they divorced a couple years ago.
_at work_
Most (all probably) people aspire to be more in whatever their passion is.
He's kind of gone off the deep end now, though given this comment he may have always been a little out of touch with reality.
He was a hero of mine, but now isn't (and IMO that's fine).
2) His general admiration of Elon Musk and positive opinion of a man who flagrantly and regularly violates the very societal norms that have provided him with the opportunities he built his life around.[0]
3) His inability to navigate Facebook/Meta to effect the change he felt was necessary [1]
4) "My core thesis is that the federal government delivers very poor value for the resources it consumes, and that society as a whole would be better off with a government that was less ambitious." (I should have known about this but didn't until relatively recently) [2]
5) The comment he made as the topic of this submission; he's completely out of touch with reality for anyone who isn't him, but doesn't seem to care at all or even really understand what other people might want.
John Carmack's way of thinking is useful for people who want to directly create things themselves, and who don't trust or can't figure out how to motivate or incentivize people to amplify their work.
When I was like that, John Carmack was my hero. Now I realize that to be the most effective version of myself, I need to have relationships with others who make me even better than I could possibly be alone. For that, John Carmack is not a good person to look up to, as he doesn't seem to be capable of growing his reach beyond himself.
So he's not my hero, he's someone I look at and now see all of the flaws that may have already been there, but weren't relevant for the time I valued him as an inspiration.
[0] https://mleverything.substack.com/p/elon-musk-john-carmack-a...
[1] https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/12/john-carmack-leaves-m...
[2] https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=1895320834...
I'll defer to Carmack's personal experience on this one.
It's clear to me Carmack lacks empathy, so his slide into American right-wing adjacent views is pretty on par.
I was asked why I no longer consider Carmack a hero, and I gave my reasons. I don't really care if you believe me or not.
So its really just a debate on ideal hours and the post fails to make an argument there.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
You are constructing a strawman. Go read his comment again. He differentiates between knowledge work and physical work.
It's not about ideal hours at all. I'll post the entire comment here for anybody that might not have clicked through so you can actually decide what it's about.
Quoting Carmack:
I find these “shorter work weeks are just as effective” articles to be nonsense, at least for knowledge workers with some tactical discretion. I can imagine productivity at an assembly line job having a peak such that overworking grinds someone down to the point that they become a liability, but people that claim working nine hours in a day instead of eight gives no (or negative) additional benefit are either being disingenuous or just have terrible work habits. Even in menial jobs, it is sort of insulting – “Hey you, working three jobs to feed your family! Half of the time you are working is actually of negative value so you don’t deserve to be paid for it!”
If you only have seven good hours a day in you, does that mean the rest of the day that you spend with your family, reading, exercising at the gym, or whatever other virtuous activity you would be spending your time on, are all done poorly? No, it just means that focusing on a single thing for an extended period of time is challenging.
Whatever the grand strategy for success is, it gets broken down into lots of smaller tasks. When you hit a wall on one task, you could say “that’s it, I’m done for the day” and head home, or you could switch over to something else that has a different rhythm and get more accomplished. Even when you are clearly not at your peak, there is always plenty to do that doesn’t require your best, and it would actually be a waste to spend your best time on it. You can also “go to the gym” for your work by studying, exploring, and experimenting, spending more hours in service to the goal.
I think most people excited by these articles are confusing not being aligned with their job’s goals with questions of effectiveness. If you don’t want to work, and don’t really care about your work, less hours for the same pay sounds great! If you personally care about what you are doing, you don’t stop at 40 hours a week because you think it is optimal for the work, but rather because you are balancing it against something else that you find equally important. Which is fine.
Given two equally talented people, the one that pursues a goal obsessively, for well over 40 hours a week, is going to achieve more. They might be less happy and healthy, but I’m not even sure about that. Obsession can be rather fulfilling, although probably not across an entire lifetime.
This particular article does touch on a goal that isn’t usually explicitly stated: it would make the world “less unequal” if everyone was prevented from working longer hours. Yes, it would, but I am deeply appalled at the thought of trading away individual freedom of action and additional value in the world for that goal.
1. He doesn't invalidate any of his points in the way you think he does
2. In the most generous interpretation of your reading of him, he frames that amounts over the average 40 hours as sometimes being "underwork", which is absolutely something the some of the "overwork" camp denies
He might have good points, or he might have bad points, but either way it's not because of your additions to the discussion just now. (i.e. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.)
I find it insulting that I must be a "nine to fiver" if I advocate for labor. My passion isn't building what my boss wants, it's building what _I_ want.
This requirement precludes finding work you enjoy, and thus those that have the opportunity to work on something they like are in the minority.
Put another way, would you quit your job immediately if you're asked to work on something you don't want to do? If not, are you a "nine to fiver"?
You should be invested in the success of the people who you work for, financially (or whatever you value).
You're a "nine to fiver" if your incentives don't align. That can be your fault, but often isn't.
Innate to our economic system is the tension between labor and employer. Us as laborers want a higher share of the profit from our labor. Employers seek the opposite, and "fulfillment" provides them the means to extract it.
Consider the wages of game developers, which have stagnated compared to less "fulfilling" SWE work, because employers are able to supplant higher pay with work that people are passionate about. If being a "nine to fiver" prevents me from falling into that trap, so be it.
If the "via" here is "by giving me money to do what I want", then I agree. GP is arguing that fulfillment from work is necessary to be an enthusiast, thus the assumption that your response is related.
Even in the purely financial scenario though, aren't the incentives still in conflict? If both you and your employer's incentive is "earn as much money as possible", then you are both vying for the same pool of profit.
And I never said there wouldn't ever be conflict, though if you fail to see the value provided to you by your employer, that's on you.
if you don't expect promotion, then there is no incentive to over-work and overdeliver.
This is how modern tech companies get ahead of legacy corps: hire young high energy and high capability folks, and let me compete with each other for tiny pool of promotion money. As a result everyone will overwork, but you have to pay only to a few who gets promoted.
Bullshit. They are trying to make millions for themselves, not me.
I'm trying to make millions for myself through my SaaS that I work on nights/weekends.
If they want to give me founding ownership of their company then I'll reconsider, but otherwise I'm just going to do the work assigned. I'm not going to be enthusiastic or care if it succeeds. I'll just do the work to the best of my ability, and then save the rest of my energy for my business, not theirs.
Why not both?
> If they want to give me founding ownership of their company then I'll reconsider
Now you're getting it, though the "founding" part seems unnecessary. If the money is what drives you, then get a cut. But once you do, your incentives will be aligned and if money really was the issue, then you should be motivated to work whatever hours are needed.
If money wasn't the issue, then incentives weren't aligned correctly.
Whether thats worth it or if employers can reasonably expect it is another matter. But absolutely more work gets done. This is a topic where the reddit and hackernoon takes are comically extreme sometimes.
They are conflating diminishing returns with less total work and it leads to ridiculous propositions. If you can get more work done in 4 days it means the 5th day of work is a negative output.
I wouldn't mind to work long hours if that would mean purely coding.
But no, employers prefer to throw bunch of non-coding tasks at engineers and introduce politics, the more higher up the chain you go and the more impact you want to make.
If you let me code and get stuff done, I will happy do it.
However if you require me to create dumb paperwork, track JIRA tickets, create reports about reports, demand using the latest TPS REPORT cover on all my deliverables - you will get 9-to-5 PERIOD
You can’t have it both ways. If you want to just code, call yourself a coder or programmer.
An “engineer” is of a profession devoted to “the application of science and mathematics by which the properties of matter and the sources of energy in nature are made useful to people.”
Making your work useful to people involves communication and research beyond coding. Maybe it ain’t jira tickets but it also ain’t “purely coding.”
You can look at gogle - the company that has never produced any useful product beyond a few of search/ads, youtube, gmail, and maybe google docs. Thats it. Nothing more.
and gogle is considered very efficient in its engineering processes, that entire industry copies it.
meanwhile the most disruptive innovation comes from small teams that dont care about formalized rituals and jsut focused on execution and coding, they dont need PM, TPM, and Agile Coach, and Engineering manager to deliver value
I see that as simply bad management, and there is indeed a ton of it. Keep in mind that agile began as a reaction to “waterfall” and was intended to reduce bureaucratic overhead and planning. But the reaction became worse than what it was reacting to.
I think throwing out all process will just lead us back to bad process. Better to have a good process - some sort of planning and system for improvement is good and necessary IMO. Especially if you’re building an organization or iteratively improving product. v1 can arguably be done seat of the pants but what about subsequent versions.
How many people have jobs where "just coding" is actually adequate to do the job? The early years of game development are perhaps the only time this was relevant, and even then it only applies if you work for yourself and not salary.
When 16 hours a day of coding will pop out a game engine a little faster, which gets it to market faster, which gets money into your bank account faster - sure, go nuts. The monetary value of your output is potentially highly disproportionate to the hours input and you the only stakeholder is you.
Of course, if you're spending a stupid number of hours a day coding and disregarding leading your art department, or guiding your other developers, or negotiating with your publishers for funding or deadlines...then you're probably not actually doing your job.
John Carmack is a very intelligent person who can teach you a lot about many extremely complex engineering-related matters.
Applying his advice on health and work-life balance without a full understanding of the many variables that skew his perspective and his own daily life is probably a bad idea.
Expertise is not automatically domain-transferable. Anyone claiming otherwise is suffering from hubris, or star-struck.