Challenging The Math of a Work Week | Hacker News Reader

Challenging The Math of a Work Week

v1again.wordpress.com

10 pointsatspcohn41 comments

This is complete bullshit. The original article is absolutely right: We work in an industry were more hours do not necessarily mean more results - and less hours do not always mean less results. Of course you can try to win by putting in more hours than everybody else, but this is a race to the bottom: There will always be somebody who will work even longer hours, even if it kills them in the long run. Or you could try to win by outsmarting others. For example, the 50% more time you have by working insane hours (like the OP suggests) was easily wasted because of politics and burocratic stuff in some companies I worked for as a freelancer.

your comments are over the top. We are talking about a 54 hour work week. Not 100 hours.

54 hours a week is still over 10 hours per day of a standard 5 day work week.

> 'But the reality is talented people are able to sustain a high level of productivity at long hours.'

This, in my opinion, is the flaw in the argument. I don't think it's true for writing code, unless what you're writing is boilerplate which requires no mental effort.

> Some of the best engineers in the world work insane hours at Google, Apple and facebook and put out great products.

Google doesn't have fixed working hours: http://www.quora.com/Does-Google-have-fixed-working-hours

From what I've heard, you're expected to get things done but no one cares how you do it. Some people work crazy hours; that's fine for them. Some people probably work 10-4 and then a little bit in the evening. Matt Welsh seems to work 9-5: http://matt-welsh.blogspot.co.uk/2010/12/day-in-life-of-goog...

I am the writer of the post and I completely support flexible work hours. Personally, I work 8:15 - 6 pm. I then go home and see my children before bed time and eat dinner with my wife. I also spend great time on the weekends with them. What I don’t do is sit in front of a TV very much being a couch potato. So my work time comes out of my personal time. Not my time with my kids.

The problem with working more hours has nothing to do with getting stuff done. The most productive code is code you don't write which you don't need to test, debug, deploy, or maintain. I have worked half as long as someone else, I produced 1/3 the code, and 1/6th the bugs. Eventually he left and I re-implemented some of their systems in 1/4th the time.

We had similar backgrounds and he was intelligent and capable, but nobody is thinking strait after an 11+ hour day. And once you start falling behind there is this tendency to either work on meaningless crap to feel productive or add just one more hack for an edge case to close out some, bug you don't really understand.

Sounds like you make your time work for you. So do I, I've had plenty of days where the clock hits 4 and I feel mentally drained and know I'm not going to get much done, and I go home. I don't work well in the morning either, so I often come in at 10. I do work very well in the evening (10-11pm) so sometimes I'll a bit of work then, if something comes to mind.

Nobody's ever complained about the amount of work I get done. The problem I have with this article is that it assumes the more hours you work the more you get done, when it's just not that simple.

Obviously this is personal experience. What I'm trying to say is that everybody's different --- the Treehouse guys are working a 4 day week with $3m a year in revenues. You can't just say 'well, if they worked a 5 day week that'd be an extra 25% more work for them' any more than you can say 'an extra 25% more work will lead to an extra 25% more in revenues for them'.

you are referencing flexible work hours, which is very different then what I am discussing. I couldn't care less when my developers work. if they want to leave at 4 pm and work late in the evenings, all good.

This, in my opinion, is the flaw in the argument. I don't think it's true for writing code, unless what you're writing is boilerplate which requires no mental effort.

Most projects involve both boilerplate and cleverness. Mine certainly do.

The cleverness I do while not tired. When I'm tired, and less productive, I do the boilerplate.

Suppose I work 60 hours, with 40 of them occurring before I'm tired. Then I get 40 hours of cleverness and 20 hours of boilerplate (while non-tired, you could probably do the 20 hours of boilerplate in 15 hours).

If you work 40 hours, you are probably doing 25 hours of cleverness and 15 hours of boilerplate (while your 15 hours are equivalent to my 20 hours). That means I'm getting 60% more hours of cleverness than you are.

I suspect this is where it comes down to anecdote and personal preference. Where we both agree I think is that (for programming especially) it's not as simple as X% more hours give you X% more work done; there are other factors at play here..

Now, I could buy a four day work week causing an overall drop in the amount of work done, but comparing them based on the same productivity is meaningless.

I'm not comparing based on the same productivity. I'm assuming that boilerplate (done while tired) takes 33% more time.

Constant productivity with regard to working time is an assumption of the original article, it wasn't intended as a criticism of your comment.

Nonsense.

The author confuses correlation with causation (employees at Google work long hours, Google makes good products, therefore long hours are needed to produce good products).

He also confuses anecdotal and empirical evidence (employees at Google work long hours, therefore this is the norm for successful companies). Anecdotal evidence is notoriously misleading; that's why control groups and large sample sizes are so important in science.

The author also doesn't account for factors other than productivity. Even assuming a company with a 5 day work week is more productive on average, it doesn't matter if the 4-day companies are more successful at attracting good programmers. A good programmer working for 4 days is going to be productive than an average programmer working for 5 days (and there is empirical evidence for this).

Employee turnover isn't touched either, or motivation, which are two huge things to deal with for any company that employs highly-skilled people.

Finally, the majority of development work is spent not bashing away at a keyboard, but instead spent thinking about problems. If you're interested in maximising the productivity of skilled developers, you want to give them environments that encourage creative thought. Keeping them in an office for 5 days a week doesn't seem like something that would encourage this.

i never said hard work = great products. Just that you can't work 50% less than your competitors and have sustained success. I also never advocated sitting at a desk and banging on a computer. Nor did i dispute giving people a creative environment. You are reading things into the post that aren't there.

Do you have any empirical evidence to back up your theory, or is it all supposition?

If it's the latter, and I assume it is, why do you present your hypothesis as if it's already fact?

Second, why do you assume that 50% less work is such a big deal? Even assuming you're right, productivity depends on many other factors that influence the result, and I'd claim by a heck of a lot more than 50%.

The theory I personally subscribe to is that the single most important factor for any software company is getting the right people. There is some empirical evidence[1] to support this hypothesis. If I'm correct, then what a company should care about is attracting and retaining talent.

So even if you assume people can work long hours without burning out, and that there's no productivity loss in doing so (and I'm pretty sure I've seen evidence to suggest otherwise), the numbers aren't on your side if your competition has all the talent because they offer a better work-week.

And even if your team is more productive, it doesn't help you if your competition builds a simpler, but more commercially successful product, because they're smarter. Just because something is harder to build doesn't automatically mean it's more profitable.

[1]: http://forums.construx.com/blogs/stevemcc/archive/2011/01/09...

I never pass on my thoughts as fact. The title of that section is "What I believe." Not "This is a fact." All of the other statements you make are false choices. You can have a hard working team that also produces simple, clean, intuitive UX. Great companies do this all of the time.

You do say "Here is what I believe" but before you get to that section you throw out statements like "Giving up an extra 13 sprints/year to a competitor is simply unsustainable."

If you meant your whole article to be taken as mere opinion, then it wasn't clear at all. It looked like you were making a series of statements that were supposed to be taken as fact, and that only the last section was your opinion on these facts.

As for my statements being false choice, I did not claim that it is impossible to have talented people working long hours, just that people are generally inclined to go for the better offer, and a 4-day week is a very good offer for someone who's pulling in six figures. If you subscribe to the theory that getting talented people is several orders of magnitude more effective than making them work long hours, then a 4-day week makes serious economic sense.

I think the recruiting benefit that Ryan states is a very, very strong point in his approach.

But the reality is talented people are able to sustain a high level of productivity at long hours . . . They work 70-80 hour weeks. And they sustain that level indefinitely.

Studies have shown otherwise; why does he think businesses went to 40 hour weeks in the first place? Concern for their employees? Don't make me laugh.

Maybe there are exceptions to this rule, and maybe all these Uber-hard working smart people congregate at startups. Of course, there's also always been the adage of "work smarter, not harder", and the longer you work (past a certain amount), no matter how good you are, the less clearly you will be thinking (in other words, you will not be working smarter).

This is also the argument that PG puts forward in different ways (eg, http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html and http://www.paulgraham.com/icad.html). Basically, if you can produce the same product, of the same quality, in less time, then you don't need to work more hours than your competition, and they will never be able to beat you if the productivity factor is high enough. Ergo, less hours, with better tools and people, will beat more hours.

Studies have shown otherwise; why does he think businesses went to 40 hour weeks in the first place? Concern for their employees? Don't make me laugh.

Mostly because of union pressure, actually.

I work 7 days a week very consistently at my startup, but I don't put in many hours in a given day. I'm too embarrassed to say exactly how many hours. I take breaks when I feel tired or frustrated, and if a problem comes up in the afternoon that I don't know how to solve, I quit for the day. Usually I will be able to solve it in the morning.

I worry sometimes about whether I am working hard enough, so recently I started doing some time tracking to see where I am spending my time. I looked around for software and decided on the Web application toggl.com. All you do is write down what you are doing, and the software logs the time. Really though you could do the same thing with a spreadsheet or a piece of paper.

It's harder than it sounds to be honest about what you are doing, and why you are doing it. I have spent a bunch of time on Hacker News this morning reading posts and writing this. Is that productive, or is it just infotainment? It's hard to say. I wonder if the author of that article counted the time spend writing the post and responding to people as a part of work hours. Why or why not?

I haven't been doing time tracking very long, but I have found that sometimes there is this period of time at the beginning of doing something where I haven't really gotten into the task yet, and I feel like "Oh man I'm working! This is a drag." That feeling peaks maybe after 20 minutes or so. I find that if I'm able to keep working, I start feeling better, and then after an hour or so I feel fine, like "This is what I'm doing. It's comfortable. I could do more."

So I think that maybe sometimes I quit too early, and I could actually be doing more without feeling stressed or overwhelmed. But I think there are limits to how much you can push, and you have to be really gentle with yourself. Because if you force yourself too much, you get burned out and then it becomes very difficult to even get started on work. You can go days or weeks at a time getting almost nothing done.

I'm also studying a foreign language at the moment, and I think it is really important to study every day. Over on the language forum I visit, lots of people talk about how many flash card reps they do, and it's almost always more than what I do. What I do seems insignificant, both in terms of reviews and new cards per day. I feel it is another example of how I don't work hard enough, and I don't have enough discipline.

But I think the only real way to fail at foreign language study is to quit, so I hope that keeping my standards for serious study low and spending more time on fun stuff like reading comics and watching TV shows in the language, I will be able to stick with it. I haven't missed a day in over 6 months, but it's going to take years to get to fluency. It's a long process.

I hope working at a startup is similar. I hope it's just a matter of making progress every day, and not giving up. I hope it's not a competition over who can work the most hours. If it is, I'm afraid I will probably lose.

Success comes in many flavors. The author's version of personal success is way more angled towards professional and business success, where I may put more emphasis on an amazing relationship with my children as a bigger factor of personal success. You can be successful by many measures, and have a growing, profitable, healthy business, without 70-80 hours a week. Are you not successful because it doesn't hit 1B in revenues?

These kind of articles frustrate me, as someone who already has a tendency to work too much at the expense of all other aspects of my life. Everyone has tradeoffs to make. The business tradeoff that Treehouse makes means that people have a higher likelihood of personal success in ventures outside of work, at what Mr. Carson sees is a minimal impact to the likelihood of business/professional success.

Can a company of people working 70-80 hour weeks be more successful than Treehouse's model? Sure. But I'd argue they're just as likely to be less successful. More code doesn't always mean more success, whatever the measure may be.

I don't work 70-80 hours per week and never advocated it. I leave the office at 6 pm. i see my kids, eat dinner with my wife and then put in a few hours rather than sit on the couch watching sitcoms.

There is a fundamental flaw in the argument that v1again is making/supporting. The problem with this argument and the math that's always used to support it, is that it comes from the view point of simply making money. If it were as simple as (number_of_hours_worked * number_of_people = awesome_product) then a company would always be able to throw money at a problem and fix it.

In the real world this is so obviously not the case that it's laughable that anyone makes the argument in the first place. If you're starting a company and you knew that in order to succeed all you had to do was work more hours than the other guy, of course you'd do it.

If your goals in business are to make money, then working crazy hours and ignoring everything else in your life probably makes sense. If you want to build a long lasting, sustainable business full of happy, productive employees who make great stuff then you probably want to make sure the work life balance is as good as it can be.

i don't disagree with this comment at all. Just that that is a decision that should have been made before taking VC money. I don't think this is a model for a VC backed company. It is a model for someone who wants to run a lifestyle business.

It's okay, they'll eventually figure it out, when they're sitting on a pile of money but nothing else to show for those endless years of 70-80 hour work weeks. Maybe they'll be plenty happy with their pile of money - more power to them. Or maybe they'll be lonely and have wasted much of their life. That's a tough dice roll to take.

this isn't about money. And i am not lonely at all. I have a very healthy social life. we are talking about a few extra hours per day, which i do at night after kids have gone to bed. you're way over stating the impact.

As a student about to enter the work force, I'm personally having an internal struggle with which lifestyle to choose to pursue. There is the go-big-or-go-home obsessive startup world work mentality, versus another side of the online world which I feel Hacker News glosses over without much recognition: building lifestyle passive income businesses online. There are countless amounts of people easily making 6 digits online, so it can't be an argument that people need to work this hard to earn a living. It's rather silly how easy it is to make money online with a simple product.

So if money isn't the problem, then why do people work their asses off until they break down or burn out? Is it just a social norm that people have to keep getting bigger, growing, hiring more, and raising more money?

Just my opinion, but you should basically do what you like. I like developing software, so working for ~40 hours a week is OK for me. But I also try not to spend too many hours (per year) working for clients so I have time for my own stuff and also for hobbies (cooking, photography, sports, ...).

I also know that I am less productive when I am tired or overworked, so this is another reasons why I try to limit my time in front of the computer. For example, when it's possible, I simply take breaks when I am tired (http://davidtanzer.net/node/114 - though this is often not possible when working for a client on-site).

I could make more money by doing the same work I do now for more hours - but that would just be a brute force solution. What I currently try is doing work that has better hourly rates. I'll also try to build some passive income - that's what you mentioned.

As a student about to enter the work force, I'm personally having an internal struggle with which lifestyle to choose to pursue.

IMHO, as someone looking back from 34yo, I would say, try EVERYTHING. Keep your costs low, and take as many big risks as you can. Keep trying different things until you find one you love, then find a way to get paid for that.

So if money isn't the problem, then why do people work their asses off until they break down or burn out?

Some people are really passionate about what they are working on, they don't care about the money. Others are unfortunately just driven by greed. If I had to recommend one over the other, I'd definitely go with passion; just be careful not to burn out.

Also, the passive income thing is always a good idea to keep in mind; put a little bit of work into it, but do it early and don't make it your main focus, otherwise it's not very passive, is it?

Honestly, if I knew how to run a passive-income business, I'd be doing it.

Think: our field is one of the few where the average worker owns his own means-of-production. Practical impact: the 40-60 hours you don't have to spend getting an income each week, if you have a passive income, can be spent on building awesome open-source projects you release for free to undercut those who like living in cubicles.

I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work.

The obligatory Office Space reference. You'd hope things would never be that bad at a startup!

Actually, it would be great to have a company so efficient that you could pay a large staff a middle-class salary for 15 minutes per person-week of actual work. The ultimate vacation policy!

Now I've got to repress my urge to write a socialist parody of Office Space.

Do I provide more value in more time?

If I work in a factory, doing trivial manufacturing tasks where you control the speed of the lane/conveyor thingy: Probably.

When you explain me what you want without having a clear picture and while omitting juicy details along the way, totally relying on my ability to think for you and 'figuring it out'? No. Not at all.

Bottom line: That blog post is not applicable to me and uses a kind of math that Germans call 'Milchmaedchenrechnung' [1] (Google Translate might help, basically it's a naive and wrong way to do math). No challenge in sight.

1: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milchm%C3%A4dchenrechnung

> I love my two sons more than anything in the world. I would jump in front of moving train to save my children. There is nothing more valuable to me than my children. And while I selfishly love spending time with them, I also believe that a big part of my responsibility as a father is to train them how to succeed in business. That is the reason that I blog.

So you have wasted X hours of your precious working time to write this blog instead of advancing your company? [Maybe the working time is not so precious then?] Or did you waste X hours of your personal freetime that you could have spend with your children, teaching them this lesson in person?

I'd like to see the math that justifies this blog.

blogging is a very productive use of time for a founder.

> "And then one day, a competitor comes out of nowhere, and has your same features, for less cost and a few new features that are awesome. And now you are playing catch up. But you will never catch up."

> "It just feels so good to type that. A self-fulfilling prophesy that feels so good. "

Who uses this self-fulfilling prophesy -- Treehouse to justify 4 day work weeks or OP to justify hard-work trumping a different view? Both can use the same argument.

> "And so here is my best advice to my sons…Be the first guy in the gym and the last to leave!"

...but are you on the field playing the game?

Good article, thank-you for the perspective.

And what about Company C that puts in 80 hours? And Company D that puts in 100 hours?

The math adds up, at least up to the point when it hits 168 hours ;)

This is really the wrong model. There is a sweet spot of hours vs. productivity somewhere, it's probably different for everyone. I guess for me it is even changing on a daily basis. Some weeks I can work through the night or on the weekend, othertimes I can't seem to get stuff done and be exhausted on a wednesday...

80 hours/wk or 100 hours/wk are extreme hours that i wouldn't or didn't advocate.

The real question is of marginal productivity-per-hour. We know that work-hours have a diminishing-returns point passed somewhere around 30-50 (depending on the person and the occupation and the match between them). I think of it this way: if you really need to work more hours to get more done, only keep doing it as long as your productivity-per-hour stays the same. That's the point where you're making a zero-sum trade of more hours for more stuff done.

However, there's also another really important aspect! If you only ever focus on working harder, anyone who works smarter can come along and beat you while working less than you. Beating them through sheer work-ethic will easily push you into negative returns-per-hour, destroying you and your business through sheer desperation.

For example, anyone with a source-control tool will be several times more productive in software engineering than someone who didn't use one and has to manually revert his changes. Remember, this used to actually happen.

So when you're working hard overtime, watch your back! You could be competing against someone cleverer than yourself.

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