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Comment by fasterik | Hacker News Reader

It doesn't seem to me like he is generalizing from his experience and applying it to the general population. He's pushing back on the very specific claim that working fewer hours leads to higher productivity. He admits that this might be true for certain assembly line-type jobs or jobs where someone just wants to collect a paycheck, but it's not necessarily true in the case of knowledge workers who care about what they are working on. I think that applies to a substantial minority of people in developed countries.

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He's pushing back on the idea with zero research and zero expertise.

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.

Disagree. Sure, he's not an empirical researcher, but he does have decades of experience being highly productive. I think his opinion holds some weight. He's also clear that he's speaking from personal experience and not making a scientific claim.

> but he does have decades of experience being highly productive

...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.

He clearly said that his points apply to "knowledge workers with some tactical discretion". He's not talking about productivity in menial jobs.

He does not have a monopoly on being highly productive.

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.

Carmack has accomplished more in the span of a few years (e.g. 1992-1997) than most people do in a lifetime. Saying that his opinion about productivity is equivalent to a random person's is just a bad faith argument.

I mean a taxi driver is almost a perfect example of “work more get more work done and more pay)”.

At some point he crashes but it’s not at 40hrs.

And the driver can actually crash. Pilots have strict work rules for a reason. People die when pilots are too tired.

Is there variance in how long people can work without degraded performance? Of course. But it still degrades for most people.

> He's pushing back on the very specific claim that working fewer hours leads to higher productivity.

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.

> pulling 80 hour weeks does get shit done faster than working 35 hour weeks.

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.

Yeah, I'm mostly with you.

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.

It doesn’t have to be the same quality. Everyone has five or ten hours a week where they’re just in the zone.

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?

After the 5-10 hours a week when you are "in the zone" you start borrowing time. It's possible to sustain productivity for significantly longer than that, but it comes at the expense of rest, which leads to burnout.

When you burn out, you no longer get 5-10 hours of focus per week; that time goes to recovery from last week.

Disagree. 80 hour weeks is not sustainable so if you are basing your startup success on that than you are doomed.

Or you're making Doom.

It is certainly sustainable to some people and I'd wager many startup founders.

Man this comment resonated with me. I am fully capable of doing productive 80 hour weeks sustainably - I did most weeks for 15 years. Took me that amount of time (and marriage, kids etc.) to realize just because I can doesn't mean I should, especially now that I'm seeing diminishing returns in terms of reward. Still love my work, it has been difficult to dial back honestly.

Where did you find the time for this? That's 14 hrs per day with a two day weekend or 11 hours over seven days.

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.

7 day option

Wow, more power to you for being able to sustain that, I almost certainly couldn't. I can definitely do six days a week relatively consistently, but seven is definitely a bridge too far for me.

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