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Comment by mixmax | Hacker News Reader

If you really want to get stuff done you shouldn't work 60 hour weeks, and certainly not 90 hour weeks.

The thing is that nobody can keep sharp and do sustainable good work for that long. You need breaks, you need outside friends, you need inspiration and you need time to think about what you're doing instead of just charging ahead and pulling hours.

It all sounds very impressive, but the results rarely are.

As an example, the two guys that wrote the V8 javascript engine for the Chrome browser worked between 35 and 40 hours a week out of a small cottage in the countryside. At five o clock they were home. And no weekend work. Yet they managed to pull off what is arguably the best javascript engine the world has yet seen, and did so in less than a year. Two guys.

They succeeded because they had time to think about what they were doing while they were having dinner, wandering in the woods or whatever two guys in a cottage do when they aren't working.

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Something I wonder about: when you hear these stories about super-programmers who work normal 40 hour workweeks and yet do something really impressive in a year, is it because they're super talented or is it because they have this huge intellectual capital reserve from past experience they can draw upon?

For example, if you look at Lars Bak's resume, he started working on the Beta programming language in 1988. (For HN readers that aren't familiar with it, Beta was an exceptionally innovative language, and I'd highly recommend learning a bit about it.) Then he joined the Self team in 1991, where he did the first dynamic-optimizing JIT compiler. Then he worked on StrongTalk at Animorphic/Longview, and then was the engineering manager for HotSpot at Sun. He's spent 20 years working on basically nothing but optimizing VMs for dynamic languages - it's no wonder that he could kick out a dynamic JIT for JavaScript in a year.

Paul Buchheit once had a thread on FriendFeed about how long it takes to build a really cool project. It took him about 3 years for GMail, and Google was kicking around in Larry & Sergey's head for 3 years before they incorporated. That seems fairly typical for most Google products.

So while most successful people will say "Work reasonable hours and get enough sleep," I wonder how many of them are able to say that because they've already put in the hours necessary to attain mastery in a subject. Perhaps the solution is to optimize for rate of learning+retention: work as long as necessary to fully understand the subject, but quit when you feel you can't concentrate and remember things. Sometimes you can work for 15 hours and learn nothing, while sometimes you'll put in 3 mind-bending hours a day and learn tons.

Talent is going to be a much bigger variable than hours. When you work 80, 90, 100 hours a week you're hitting diminishing returns in a big way. Also, even at 40 hours a week, very few people achieve maximum efficiency every second from 9 to 5.

I think rather than worrying about hours, entrepreneurs and other people who want to be highly effective should worry about how to improve their skills and focus when they are at work. There's a way in which a 100-hour work week can become a scapegoat... if you fail to produce at least no one can say you weren't committed. However, if you are truly only interested in results, you need to step back and ask yourself objectively are you making the best choices or are you just trying to cover your ass? I realize that outside perceptions actually do matter a tremendous amount to business success, but the bottom line is that the best person to build something is not simply the person who is willing to work the longest hours.

I think you have hit the nail on the head here.

Most of the blowout successes I'm aware of have had a long period of protection from competition while the founders became world-class experts in whatever it was they were doing. That could mean a period in academia, open source, or a long period of learning at some other company in the industry.

There are a few cases I know of where the founders were not experts, but in those cases it was because they stumbled onto a new market, so nobody else knew more than they did. And even then they were well prepared to exploit it, through related work.

Also: 40 hours a week is a LOT. If you don't fritter it away with meetings, office hours, coordinating with vendors, and so on.

Amen. I can't count the number of times I've solved a problem while walking somewhere or doing something completely unrelated to work.

There was an article about marketing on the front page of HN yesterday that said 'think smarter, not louder,' and I'd argue that working a 90 hour week for any reason is just thinking louder.

Everyone answers these things as if humans were completely homogenous. Some people can do math better than others; some people can run faster than others; some people can work longer than others.

Like most of these sorts of debates it mostly ends up being people justifying what they're already doing and comfortable with. Sure, there are studies, but they're about the median; startups are about the statistical outliers on one or more vectors.

I don't think humans are so weak that they can't handle 60 hour weeks, but 90 is definitely too much. I agree very strongly with the overall idea of your post, but for me it is all about building the right kind of balance in my life so that I can have maximum productivity. For me, that is 70 hour weeks as a single fellow with a highly optimized life (premade meals, standardised routine etc)

I completely agree - and that is what I am working towards.

was this cottage on Brokeback Mountain? kidding

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