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Comment by leftnode | Hacker News Reader

The paragraph

When Mayer suspects an employee might burn out, she asks them to find their rhythm. They've come back with, "I need to be home for Tuesday night dinners," or "I need to be on time for my daughter's soccer games."

really bothers me. If employee burnout is a regular thing inside your organization, that's a serious issue that needs solving. But to have to ask permission to spend time with your family is ridiculous.

If you're working 130 hours a week, something is seriously, seriously wrong.

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Agreed, it reads like pure insanity.

That you would only be "granted" to have time for your family if you're on the brink of burn-out is ... horrible. I'm pretty sure that's not the general guideline about how Google operates, not sure if there's some editing and/or language barrier here.

I don't think there is any such barrier. I've read multiple articles from multiple publications about the same Marissa Mayer, and they all have the same anecdotes and themes. If it's so consistent across multiple publications, you have to think she really does say all these things. Whether she walks the talk is another question, but she's probably a freak of nature who is really able to do so.

Moreover, the legend of the über-productive employee who never sleeps is a double-edged sword and can demotivate the employees that person touches in ways that far outweigh the direct positive impact to the company that person has. As stated above, it's one thing to work 12-16hr days during start-up phase, but if you're doing it as a matter of fact when you're a 30,000 person company, frankly you're doing it wrong -- even if you're the founder, owner, board member or C-level executive. Leading via exemplary personal performance and ethics is one thing; driving those values throughout the organization is far more important.

This really bothered me too. Maybe they just didn't phrase it well, but the sentence "Grant your employees one must-have freedom" is horrible. If you're considering freedoms something that have to be granted to you by your employer, or worse, if you're an employer who thinks that way, there's already something terribly, terribly wrong.

Not always.

I get the feeling that the article was more written with the mind of the early days of Google- where one employee working 130 hour weeks could save the company tens/hundreds of thousands, and she wanted it to work that well.

Google most definitely doesn't require those insane hours out of people today- hell, quite the opposite. Requesting to spend time with your family does seem ridiculous, but the thing is, if you're in a small startup that is trying to get somewhere fast? You knew what you were getting into, no one forced you into the job, and maybe you should have chosen something that allowed more family time without having to ask. That doesn't make the job bad or 'seriously wrong', it's just a different life situation.

Similarly, there are a lot of people who want to work that hard, for something they believe in or are passionate about, but they find themselves incapable. That's what the article is really for.

Well, I think that's the problem with the article--is the advice geared toward start-up employees, or current Googlers? I agree that in a start-up, you should likely expect longer weeks (even all-nighters), and maybe you do need to ask to have dinner with your family[1]. But at an established company? Seems like a cultural issue.

[1] FWIW, I still think this is insane, and would never want to do it.

I think she is merely recounting a story from the early days of Google and relating it to the larger problem of employee burnout. I know quite a few current Googlers and as far as I understand nothing so ridiculous happens there now. Of course the problem is incredibly relevant to Startups: I would never enjoy myself in such a restrictive situation unless I was working on my idea but again different people have different tolerance levels...

I think you're right, I certainly don't see much of that kind of thing around here now (there probably are some engineers pulling long hours, but they're the exceptions and it's not generally expected). Could be partly related to the location, although I haven't seen evidence of people doing 80+ hour weeks in other offices yet either.

I don't disagree, and I'm trying to criticize Mayer here--I think the "article" is a bit poorly written, and I imagine some mid-manager somewhere reading it and thinking "oh, I can make my devs works 100 hours a week, as long as I let them eat dinner with their kids once a week."

And that's okay. It isn't for everyone. Me? I managed to do 60 hours in a 3 day week last week, my first week at a new job. I loved it, and am proud of the work I did in that time. I plan on doing 60-70 hours a week consistently if I can, just because I enjoy it.

One thing that's critical here is to internalize the wisdom in "more speed, less haste." Know yourself, and find your productivity sweet spot.

For example, I am most productive when I am doing approx 6 hrs of heavy coding a day. More than that and productivity slowly drops. Less, and I could be doing more. That leaves time for meetings, management activity, etc. Most of the time I can out-produce at least three other developers together at 6 hrs/day, and I don't care how much time they put in.

That allows really 10-12 hours of work a day max, which means really no more than 90 hours of work a week assuming doing some work every day.

> If employee burnout is a regular thing inside your organization, that's a serious issue that needs solving.

Congratulations, you have discovered the entire point of the article.

> But to have to ask permission to spend time with your family is ridiculous.

I didn't see any "ask permission" going on. I saw a manager who realized this is something she has to discover from her employees, and then made sure they received it.

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