Sergey Brin says 60 hours a week is the 'sweet spot' | Hacker News Reader

Sergey Brin says 60 hours a week is the 'sweet spot'

fortune.com

37 pointshakaneskici61 comments

Can I suggest an experiment?

Sergey could decide to be put in a shared cube farm for 6x 10s a week and see how long he lasts.

I think there's a large difference between the fatigue invoked in work that is some variant of managerial "in meetings where it's low information hot takes 80% of the time" work, and actual engineering work where drafting design documents, working on code, and context switching while waiting for CI or other compute intensive processes to complete, or for folks to do a code review.

This and take away his nannies, chauffeurs and other servants. Let his wife work a regular job too.

If you are not privileged, running a family is another 40 hour a week job.

To that let's add the stress of financial ruin or major setback in case he loses his job due to a competitive ratings-based "objective" perf review.

feed the cat do the laundry clean the toilet sweep the floor buy the groceries pay the bills call the cable company change the oil in the car water the plants take out the trash scoop the litterbox file your taxes cook dinner do the dishes make a dentist appointment mow the lawn go to the post office buy your brother a birthday gift change the sheets fix the lightswitch unclog the shower get the brakes fixed on the car get the car washed clean out the gutters…

Chores are holidays when you got work and kids...

I mean, I take your point and even agree with you. But, to be fair, I'm sure Sergei worked 60+ hours/week when Google was starting.

There is a difference between choosing to work 60 hours at your own startup with the prospect of a very large payout and being salaried at a giant company.

It's almost like how many hours a week a person can work on a thing depends on their ownership of the thing, their domestic situation, and their financial state.

Just to add: ownership and agency, I know a few startup founders who completely wrecked their mental health after accepting dumb money which took away their agency to pursue their vision while still having to work absurd hours.

Ah, but you see, Sergey cares about his company, not their company. Or their lives. Or their needs. Or their wants.

He is Empire and he is what Matters.

I did the same for the projects I created or were fun for me. However, there is a limit and at some point you just hurt your body, some of it can be irreparable. You may not notice it when being younger but you will need to pay for that later.

I would argue that the difference is not as much in the type of activities, but rather in your ownership and control over them. When it's "your" project and you decide how to do things (at most with feedback from a handful of others whom you all know personally), then you can be extremely productive and motivated working even more than 60h/week for months.

This is valid, when you're not encumbered by a process or person that has to have input on your every move, you can be very productive.

As someone who actually really likes process, if you want to encourage some sort of best practice without causing pain, you absolutely must automate the process and not put people in the critical path. For example, if you have a coding standard make sure that linters that are fast and cheerful enforce it, not other people.

Also, I don't agree with the "months" - maybe a weekend or whole week, but other than that you're headed into burnout territory.

This is not true. Even if it is your project. For a regular person without all the paid support systems (maids, cooks, etc), burn out is inevitable. You can do it for a while, but its not a sustainable situation. It is also likely that recovery from burnout will take longer and reduce your efficacy much more than was gained from overworking in the first place.

Do you imagine he never worked hard? Who is lacking imagination here?

I'll not be taking advice on how many hours per week I should work from someone who doesn't work at all.

"No amount of success at work makes up for failure at home."

I suppose 60 hours might be a good spot for someone who doesn't have a family and isn't interested in having one.

Or friends, or hobbies, or ...

Hours worked isn't the problem. It's super easy to work a ton when the motivation is right.

Google becoming organizationally deadlocked is the problem.

It bears repeating: Google _basically invented_ the transformer architecture and were out-executed. Doesn't matter whether people were working 40 hrs remotely or 100 hrs per week on-site; this is an organizational failure.

Anyway, it sucks to see Sergey sell out like this.

Previous discussion:

Google's Sergey Brin Asks Workers to Spend More Time in the Office

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43201709

Sergey Brin says AGI is within reach if Googlers work 60-hour weeks

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43208890

Google's Sergey Brin: Engineers Should Work 60-Hour Weeks in Office to Build AI

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43211925

In memo to Google's AI team, Sergey Brin says 60 hours a week is 'sweet spot'

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43213982

Sergey Brin says RTO is key to Google winning the AGI race

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43221105

60 Hours a week is the sweet spot of productivity?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43229125

You’d think that a guy this smart would know that the data not only disagrees with this, but that this rules out anyone with a family

That's the thing, with these guys that have been lucky enough to make it in the current economic system, their detachment from reality and their indifference toward other human beings always goes further than their intelligence, which, like everyone else's is generally limited and narrow.

It's not even our current system, they made it at the exact time that large parts of our current infrastructure was being established.

Zuckerberg is in a lot of ways a pretty impressive outlier to get into the club as late as he did and that was only a few years later.

Sergey, like most if not all of the CEO class, doesn't see workers as people. They are a resource to be maximally exploited for their benefit.

Why do people keep making the mistake that smart people are good at doing everything? A person could be a mathematical genius or an amazing computer scientist, but that doesn’t necessarily make them a good leader or even a good parent. Just look at how badly Ilya Sutskever messed up at OpenAI. And in Google’s case, Sergy himself, divorced from his wife, leads me to believe he’s not someone who knows how to balance a family with work.

I wish society frowned upon the stupid and degrading ideas of people like that ugly Bozo.

I'll link my favorite article about America's "Live to work" attitude:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/02/religion-w...

Derek Thompson likens it to a religion: "Workism". It should be viewed with disdain and suspicion, but is instead valorized and celebrated.

The "follow this formula exactly or you're doing it wrong" guide to overworking. Funny stuff.

He also warned against working more than 60 hours a week, saying it could lead to burnout, while calling out those who work less.

Anyone who makes C-suite money would have no problem working 60 hours per week for a few years. At the level of money making once you get burn out you just retire.

Well I'm all ears if I can get a job that I really love. Hour is not a problem. I can work 80, 100, you name it.

But until then I'm just going to work the maximum minimum that my employer is OK with.

I name it: 192.

But I'm a Beatles fan

That's o300 hours!

I definitely am not on the side of making policy of such work hours (it's illegal to work more than 40 hours / week and on Sundays [for most] here in Germany, and I support that), but to play devil's advocate a little bit...

I feel I've benefited a lot from being really obsessed with certain programming projects earlier in life, "worked" (?) something like 80 hours per week, basically every waking hour, got well ahead of my peers and set up the great and relaxed career I enjoy now.

So actually in some ways, working your ass off early in youthful exuberance and then reaping the benefits later can be the "lazy" option, no?

If you want a team to work 60 hours, it’s definitely possible to filter hiring for workaholic types who genuinely love doing that. But it’s a really bad idea to force people who aren’t like that to maintain face in office.

Says the guy who was in retirement for the last 6 years. Unbelievable how intelligent people can sometimes be so obtuse.

Observations that most people who are supposed to be on the clock 40 hours never got anywhere close to that amount of time working.

We have our fun games we have to check into Reddit Facebook other social media, not to mention actually talking or their coworkers about cat videos etc. The amount of work actually done during work is fairly small. Wrapping that up to 60 hours a week will probably just make the most people double down on figuring out how to make those bad hours more endurable

I wish the Internet had actually turned out to be democratizing

Pretty sure $10 million is the sweet spot for compensation too

Have you forgotten about this, Brin? It was invented at Google:

Nudge management: applying behavioural science to increase knowledge worker productivity https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s41469-017-0014-1

It's strange to have so much anti-sentiment here about the internal data that Google has.

Of course Sergey doesn't have to spend 60 hours as he retired.

I have never been asked to work more than 40 hours when I was working at Google, I had amazing salary, and I knew that the people who are getting promoted over level 4/5 were working on the weekends as well, 60 hours was just normal for them.

Google has enough data to see that the most productive engineers are the ones who spend so much time mastering their skill.

Also I believe an AI company (which Google categorizes itself as) can't stay competitive with China if the 100 people in the core AI team work just 40 hours a week. For the rest of 100000 people it doesn't matter that much, as they are working more on integration and less competitive stuff.

Google must have more PHds that most US Universities combined, and as you acknowledge 60 hours is the normal. The results speak to itself.

For the last 10 years, not a single innovative product out of selling ads, search sucks and have been outclassed in AI.

Maybe work smarter?

It's making more money selling ads than the AI companies selling AI, so it's classic innovators dilemma: they can't really launch an AI product that gives better quality results then Google search ads, which are really bad at this point.

I should have talked about the Google of pre 2010, while it was a great company and the time I also wanted to work 60 hours a week there.

For the current one, not so much

I don't believe him. I'm sure forcing people to work more hours would be even sweeter for him.

I don't even think that is true.

Onboarding time and brain drain when someone leaves are real problems for companies. Burning people out in a few years is just not efficient.

I also don't think people can be productive for that long, for me personally the limit is at about 36 hours in 5 days.

And why would you let a single person work for 60 hours when you could easily spread that work over multiple people? I assume ABC is large enough to do that?

It doesn't even increase productivity! These clowns do it purely as power play.

So driving to the office and back home is now counted as paid working time?

It sounds like Sergey is going to cause another exodus of talented employees to their own AI startups. Why anyone with talent would work at Google these days is beyond me.

I hope people see what that really means. Corporations with historically record profits are laying off people and their largest shareholders now start these oppressing talking points.

First, they made people fight for scraps. If I make 50k but my colleague makes 75k, we must compete. If an acquaintance makes 200k because they chose the right path in high school, they must be really wealthy, therefore I must take that expensive car loan to not look like I am falling too far behind. While truly wealthy people live in the parallel universe and we don't see them because they managed to isolate their lives so well from the normies.

Then, people must to go back to the office; I guess this one's been ticked as successful in their minds.

Now, a new talking point emerges: you must work 60 hours to build a tool that will, hopefully, according to them, get you laid off.

We are speedrunning into a Neuromancer-type present with barely any resistance. Personally, I believe it's a plutocrat's utopia and won't happen, but the cost of it will be a never-before-seen kind of revolution and crash, likely marked by war. In the end, nobody will benefit.

>"Competition has accelerated immensely and the final race to AGI is afoot"

And of course Sergey needs to win since poor thing need another yacht for Mondays. And of course those ungrateful workers must work their asses off to help the "needy".

Go fuck yourself Sergey.

996 anyone? [1]

Seems to be normal elsewhere, why not here in the West? What makes the "workers" here any different to those in other places?

This is globalisation, internationalisation and capitalism. Be thankful not to have to go down the mines to fetch the rare metals needed for the "digital" revolution. Nor working slave-like conditions making the fast fashion to glorify our individualised tastes and styles. Or having to work on container ships carry the cheap plastic products from China to the West. Those kind of jobs don't have "work from home" clauses.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/996_working_hour_system

Should've stayed in soviet union then

Sergy has too much money for me to take him seriously.

Advice from back when he wasn't wealthy is still good, but seriously, why would you take any working-class advice from a multi-billionaire? That would be the most out-of-touch advice you could receive.