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Comment by jackgavigan | Hacker News Reader

When Google was a young company, she worked 130 hours per week and often slept at her desk.

"For my first five years at Google, I pulled an all-nighter every week," Mayer said in a recent talk at New York's 92Y cultural center. "It was a lot of hard work."

Source: http://www.entrepreneur.com/blog/223723

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I'm sorry but that's bullshit and unsustainable imo. I say that as someone who has worked nearly 100 weeks of 80+ hours over my career and has worked 100 hour weeks for a month or two.

It's not believable that Mayer worked 130 hours per week for 5 years.

Its technically possible, all you have to do is put sleep in your task list.

Mayer apparently has the gene that makes you not require (much) sleep. About 3% of the population carries a genetic mutation that means they only need about 3.5-4 hours of sleep a night. I had a friend back in college that was like this (her father was too), and apparently a number of famous achievers have "suffered" from this.

Businesspeople exaggerate and even outright lie all the time. You should always keep a grain of salt around.

That is so false, and if it's true is unbelievably stupid. It means that your work is so useless you can do it completely sleep deprived and burnt out.

Wow, a great contribution to a company.

I'd think that a company that needs to perform at the highest level should do so with smart people giving their best hours and resting appropriately so they can be sharp.

The number of hours is irrelevant. Great people are great because their contributions are of great value, not because they contribute mediocre work three times as much as everybody else.

What makes this comparison not applicable is that the interviewed intern said that they were really just adding warm bodies. I am sure Mayer added far more than that.

>I am sure Mayer added far more than that.

Eh, depends on who you ask.

I somehow feel that when your company is growing 1000% a week and you have lot of equity in that company, somehow you find strength to work that many hours without breaking sweat. I believe thats more enjoyable experience than just work.

but would you have the self discipline to recognise when long hours are becoming counter-productive, and being harmful not helpful?

Where "somehow you find strength to work that many hours" actually means "somehow you find self-deception to blind yourself to the fact that you're harming your company, not helping it". If you came into work every day drunk, would you expect to be lauded as a hero or would you expect to get a warning followed rapidly by dismissal? Working excessive hours has about the same effect on your judgment, and should be treated the same way.

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