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Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

Back on those halycon days where they'd actually let me leave the office before 11:30 PM, my salaryman schedule was hitting the last subway at approximately 12:05 AM to hit the last train at 12:30 AM, which got me into Ogaki at 1:05 AM and to my apartment at 1:30 AM. If I was able to eat in 30 minutes, that meant I'd get 5 hours and 20 minutes of sleep and still make it in by 9 AM the next morning.

That's when everything went right and I could actually leave nice and early at 11:30 PM, though. When our schedule was not quite so lax, I got to trade the commute home for a much shorter commute to one of the local business hotels. Unfortunately, even shaving an hour off the commute would very rarely leave me with a restful night's sleep.

Dear reader, if you are offered this schedule, run screaming. It literally nearly killed me. By the end of my 3 years I was suffering blackouts on the return trip.

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In the end, do you think the 15-16 hour work day was close to being as productive as two 8 hour work days?

I feel that in the end you will create more harm than good as more mistakes creep in during the later hours of the day which will then have to fixed the next day. (aside from your mental/physical health going to shit that is)

At the best of times, dear God no. At the worst of times, a week of 16+ hour days probably accomplished less than two 4 hour days.

You know how great your ability to debug a hard problem through multiple levels of a call stack is when you're so tired that you don't know what day of the week it is and cannot remember the name of any Java implementation of the Map interface? Yeah. Those were probably not my most productive days in my career. Now stick six months of them end to end.

Better question: does working a 15-16 hour day, day after day, result in higher productivity than 8 hour days?

I suspect that there are no creative/logical jobs where that is the case.

I doubt there's any work where this is the case. 8h to eat, wash and rest does not leave sufficient rest time for physical recuperation any more than mental, at least in the general case (I'm sure there are people at the end of the bell curve for whom it's sufficient).

I'm curious why you ever accepted in the first place? False advertising? And why you stayed three years?

A strong desire to continue living in Japan, where this is pretty much the societal expectation for professional work. I stayed there three years because I had made a commitment to do so to my bosses. They had staked their careers on "This wild unprecedented decision to hire an American will not blow up in our faces." They were scrupulously fair in their dealings with me, particularly in one way which is table stakes in the US but requires anomalously strong moral character to do in Japan, and so I tried to uphold my end of the bargain.

It seems like they killed you with kindness. My grandma likes to play the saint and guilt me into doing her bidding to this day, I've become allergic to this.

> this is pretty much the societal expectation for professional work

This alone almost entirely explains, to me, the negative birth rate in Japan. For people at optimum reproductive age (18-35), there's just no time.

With such a crazy work schedule, does that even allow you to enjoy the reasons/desire to live in Japan? I mean, how much time is left in a week to live your non-working life?

I am assuming here that these was when you were single..

It literally nearly killed me.

Is this related to the health issues briefly discussed in your latest year-in-review posting[1]?

[1] http://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/01/06/kalzumeus-software-year-...

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