Success at Work, Failure at Home | Hacker News Reader

Success at Work, Failure at Home

scott.a16z.com

362 pointssethbannon165 comments

I very clearly remember the week this clicked in my brain. Being very successful, really crushing it, and whining to my wife that the company should give more vacation, and her reminding me that I had been at work on Christmas Eve. My whole perspective collapsed around that instant. I could see the hit in career path I was going to take by changing my perspective, but I decided to do it anyway. And I have always been glad I made that choice.

The challenge is there will always be people who are willing (either consciously or unconsciously) to throw away their family and personal relationships in order to pursue success in their career, and it is difficult, if not impossible to compete against them with the 'balanced life' bit set.

> The challenge is there will always be people who are willing (either consciously or unconsciously) to throw away their family and personal relationships in order to pursue success in their career, and it is difficult, if not impossible to compete against them with the 'balanced life' bit set.The challenge is there will always be people who are willing (either consciously or unconsciously) to throw away their family and personal relationships in order to pursue success in their career, and it is difficult, if not impossible to compete against them with the 'balanced life' bit set.

This is the part that I think a lot of people don't acknowledge. I supposed that's because in a work environment -- as opposed to something more directly competitive like sports -- you're comparing your performance mostly to your would-be self rather than to others. But it's certainly worth noting that there exist people who not only want to work 80-hour weeks, but can do so consistently and thrive.

I've often wondered about this, whether it's possible to still be a big career success and compete against those who are willing to give up their whole personal life for it. I'm not entirely certain I've got an answer, but the solution that comes to me is to make use of certain competitive advantages you have that they don't:

1.) When you're heads-down on a goal, you often miss other things that are going on in the world, like technology shifts or social changes that may affect your business. Someone who makes time for a social life will be much better informed about these, because they have more information coming in from friends and acquaintances.

2.) People who work all their time often get very good at repressing their emotions, because emotionally, it really sucks to work all the time. That blinds them to an important source of information, which makes them make poor global optimizations about their time usage because the rational brain isn't as effective as the emotional brain at processing large amounts of not-directly-comparable information.

3.) People who get used to working all the time often get very impatient and feel they must be doing something productive with every moment. This makes them unsuitable for jobs which require that you sit back and wait.

The biggest example I can think of of people using these against their competitors is Warren Buffett, who's famously built a massive investment firm by being "patient capital", that's willing to wait out the periodic panics and take advantage of them. While the rest of the financial industry runs around like chickens with their heads off, he sits back in Omaha, with a normal middle-class lifestyle, and waits for their emotions to get the best of them and make them do something. And then he swoops in at reduced prices, buys, and waits for the price to come around again.

It depends on your definition of success and what you want to optimize for.

So don't compete with them.

There appears to be an implicit assumption in many of these comments that success is measured solely by career progress. The vibe seems to be something like: "How can I successfully compete with these folks who do nothing but work?"

The truth is, maybe you shouldn't try. Clayton Christensen, author of the mega-influential book, "The Innovator's Dilemma," wrote another book that addresses this issue called, "How Will You Measure Your Life?" In it, he recounts how none of his bright, talented, and good-natured classmates from Harvard Business School graduated with plans to get divorced, become ostracized from their children, and end up in prison. Yet some of them did.

He claims that it's easy to optimize for career success because it's straightforward to measure, whereas success in relationships and raising children is only apparent after many years of hard work.

Ultimately, the book encourages its readers to determine their own definition for success and build a strategy to achieve it. If your definition of success includes a certain minimum level of career accomplishment, but also strong, happy relationships, and satisfaction from meaningful volunteer work, then you should not optimize solely for career accomplishment. And perhaps you shouldn't feel weighed-down by the need to compete with exclusively-career-focused individuals.

Quote from interview with Clayton Christensen putting this advice into practice: "Most people have never thought through how they're going to allocate their time. You need to make a decision in advance. I never work on Saturday. I don’t ever work on Sunday either. If you make that decision on a macro level once, when all the incremental decisions arise on an incremental basis, life is easier." http://www.businessinsider.com/clay-christensen-how-will-you...

YES! its worth telling managers and subordinates that we wont be working more than 40 - 50 hours. and that we should work both hard and smart in he alotted time ...then get the F out of work and do other things.

i often find it refreshing to hear about the cool things people do when not working and bummed when i hear someone - especially one of my devs - worked through a weekend. then comes the difficult and uncomfortable chore of figuring out what i fucked up that caused them to have to work like that.

My experience is that people who consistently overwork and choose work over their family life feel that those who don't are lazy. The inability to have reasonable expectations of others, and tendency to look down on coworkers can undermine large projects or create a reputation of being incapable of working with others. This can limit their career, especially at senior levels where employees are expected to coordinate high risk projects across many people or serve as a mentor for newer employees.

I'm facing many of the challenges Scott is talking about. I churned through the first part of the essay and thought "yes! yes! yes, yes, let's get to the solution!" But the second part of the essay falls short for me.

It's a bit like the depression and the broken hand cartoon[1]. I can't disconnect. I know I'm supposed to turn off my phone, do household chores, and take my wife out to a nice dinner. I know taking the time to do these things makes me happier and more productive. It's not that I don't know this, it's that actually doing it requires enormous discipline, but after spending 80 hours a week slowly changing reality by a sheer force of will, I have no more willpower left for anything else.

I also know I don't have to feel like I'm changing reality by a sheer force of will, and in fact, feeling this way is a sign that I have a lot to learn about leadership and about life. But that's not something I can just decide to change either.

The problem is very real. The solution, at least for me, is as elusive as ever.

[1] http://www.akimbocomics.com/?p=573

> The solution, at least for me, is as elusive as ever.

If you define "the problem" as "I want to work 80 hours/week + have a healthy family life", well, yes, that's always going to be elusive. I.e. impossible.

Pretty sure the answer is to just not work 80 hours/week.

> but it's not something I can decide to change either

It is probably convenient for you to think that, but unless you have some sort of mental health condition (delusions of grandeur, etc.), I doubt it.

One way or the other, you're making choices you want to make.

And that's fine, but you might as well be honest with yourself/others about why you're making them, and that you must implicitly be okay with the trade offs.

It is probably convenient for you to think that, but unless you have some sort of mental health condition (delusions of grandeur, etc.), I doubt it.

So what would you say to the young [insert famous and wealthy figure here]?

What would I say? Just what I'd said; that searching for a "solution" that allows working 80 hour weeks + having a healthy family life is futile because, IMO, it doesn't exist.

At least when you have kids. I could see a spouse being okay with "5-10 years of hard work" for lots of freedom after that.

Hard to make that sacrifice with kids though, because after 5-10 years, they're basically not kids anymore.

Ironically, if the 5-10 years works out, and the kids have a guaranteed life of luxury because of it, they might be grateful.

But I don't think it usually works out that way.

(Note that I'm only focusing on the "80 hours/week" thing. If you can pull off "changing the world" (or at least your pocket book) on 40 hours/week, more power to you.)

Yes I agree it's hard and I struggle with some of these issues but I'm luckier I'm a bit older (wiser) Probably would have screwed it up more 10 years ago. He mentions "truth in calendaring" which is pretty good. The raw point there is that right now your actions reflect your preferences. You love everything about your startup and want to be connected to every little blip every waking second. There's nothing wrong with that per se. Some people just freaking love to work and build things and have that adrenaline thrill. The problem arises if you think about losing your family. He makes a quick reference in the article but it sounds like his wife pretty much threatened to leave him and only then did he pull his head out of his ass. So think about it like that. How much fun would your startup be if you were coming home to an empty house? That'll chill you enough to shut off the phone or force calendar an evening a week or a full 6 hours one weekend afternoon unplugged and just fully immersed with your family.

There are corollaries to "turn off the phone, do household chores, take spouse to dinner" that you've probably tackled successfully in the work context. It's not the nicest thought in the world, but personal life (and family in particular) is often a similar schlep as a startup.

My wife and I are going through this right now. My wife has a senior director position in a multi-billion dollar financial company, and I am a programmer at a startup. We just had a child several months ago, and it's been very hard trying to balance work and life. It's actually the hardest thing we've both had to do in our lives.

Her job is a minimum of 60-hrs per week, but luckily I'm able to limit my work to 40-hrs per week, my company has been incredibly supportive. But truth-be-told my productivity has been affected by at least 50% over these past few months, especially after my wife and I both went back to work. There's been a lot of guilt from both our ends, due to how much slips through the crack both at work and at home because of trying to raise our kid as best as we can.

The key, I hope, is to keep focused as a team, meaning we try to pick each other's slack with no resentment. It's tough living and raising a family in Silicon Valley, due to the demands of work, and given how expensive things like houses in decent areas are.

You're a new parent, you're working 40 hours per week and somehow your employers are incredibly supportive?

I don't know what the psychological term is. Cognitive dissonance? Stockholm syndrome?

After working the first few months and taking days/weeks off whenever I wanted to, I took an entire month off with full pay and no PTO days. They didn't even question it. If I need to take more time off on the order of months, it wouldn't be a problem. On top of that I had to push out some deadlines by a couple of months. That's incredibly supportive in my book.

How do your cow-orkers feel? Would any of them like a month off on full pay to pursue a personal project?

Why shouldn't they be? Am I just too European to understand this comment?

Nearly identical situation, newborn kid. I'm at a place now where working 40 hours a week is not unusual or looked down upon. It's still a successful web company. I ended up here having worked anywhere from 50-100 hour weeks in academia, by following the "deathbed principle:" when deciding whether to do X, imagine yourself on your deathbed, and decide if you would wish you had done X or more of X. It puts things nicely in perspective. I now sleep well at night (well, kid permitting) and don't feel bad about not killing myself with work. There are certainly coworkers who work more hours, and no doubt they will get better bonuses/promotions but that's fine by me.

Hehheh you American people are crazy. 60 hours, 40 hours... I work three days per week, my wife two. I get to enjoy taking care of my baby girl for a full two days every week while the wife works. The weeks fly by.

But hey, you're doing it to yourself you know?

One thing you can do at home is the cooking (including buying the food and the washing up). It is not hard to do if it is something you always do.

Serve up a great meal prepared from actual ingredients and enjoy eating it - plus the conversation that goes with it. If you can do this then you are likely to succeed at home.

If you can make cooking something you enjoy then that becomes an 'inline hobby', i.e. something to care about, enjoy and look forward to doing. It does not need extra time. You can feel good about yourself for doing it if what you serve is well appreciated. But you have to do it as soon as you get in, put your feet up, watch teevee, allow an hour to pass and it all goes wrong.

> But you have to do it as soon as you get in, put your feet up, watch teevee, allow an hour to pass and it all goes wrong.

I totally agree with this. If I plop down on the couch right after getting home from a day of work, inertia tends to keep me there. I'll become almost annoyed that I'm hungry and begrudgingly get up to microwave something really fast. If I go straight to cooking and doing other chores as soon as I get home I tend to eat a much better meal and feel much more relaxed once I do sit down.

This seems great. But if you have kids and this is your main or 'only' interaction at home, you're going to miss out on a great deal of their lives while you are working weekends, holidays, etc. It is much better than nothing though. And loving your contribution is a great thing. Not arguing against just pointing out that children change the whole game (if you care about watching them grow up in a meaningful way.)

I think this is an example of a problem I see with a lot of hard-working cultures like startups. You're always optimizing your productivity locally.

It's easy to just say "oh, I'll work harder now" because, simply, you'll get more done than you would otherwise. Today will be more productive. Most importantly, the increased productivity is viscerally obvious.

But working too much, making sacrifices at home, having problems with your family, not having enough breaks--all that saps your productivity on a global state. Sure, at any given day, you will accomplish more by working 12 hours than 8. But, over time, you will start accomplishing less per hour, largely without noticing it. And while working longer will still optimize locally, you will actually become significantly less productive overall!

This is not a character flaw or anything like that. It's just a result of the fact that local improvements are so much easier to see and understand than global trends. So to counter it, you have to think ahead of time and ideally keep some metrics to measure this explicitly. (Of course, I'm not sure what such metrics would be--measuring productivity is extremely tricky.)

There's a particular study that gets linked that found working a single 60-hour week is an immediate improvement, but working consistent 60-hour weeks is actually strictly worse than mostly sticking to 40. But it's so easy to trick yourself into thinking that you have to work those 60 hours because you need to finish more now. It's definitely something you should watch out for.

EDIT: http://legacy.igda.org/why-crunch-modes-doesnt-work-six-less... is the article I was thinking about.

i agree with the spirit of this but the flaw in this reasoning is an assumption that all hours are equal. Working consistent 80 hour weeks is the reason we got the Mac as well as Facebook. The extreme outcome possible due to one locally focused push could far outweigh any other strategy and could also be the maximum of the global state.

And what's your proof that without 80-hour weeks we wouldn't have got the Mac or Facebook?

All of those people were also wearing underwear, so if correlation is all the proof we need around here, then I've got me a new business book to write: Steve's Secret: What Every Silicon Valley Entrepreneur Has In Common

I can even try to get data on whether boxers or briefs lead to better marketplace success, and gin up some fake controversy. It'll be the next NYT best-seller. Eric Ries, watch out!

Thank you for stating that, it's one of my biggest pet peeves as well. The startup culture is one of doing regression on the 0.001% of the companies who become unicorns, while completely ignoring the failures.

I really want someone to start putting together stats of successful businesses that were built working at most 40 hours a week without wrecking homes, by people who knew how to use their time wisely. People who didn't fart around at the office, hanging out with the guys watching anime at night and doing whatever other freshman dorm-room behavior you constantly see the worst performers do at the coworking spaces.

The issue is one of serial vs parallel processing. You cannot treat all hours as equal when you or someone else is the bottleneck for your entire startup/project. In this case the local and the global optimization problem need to be solved together, or it just won't work. That being said, I think that not all local optimization problems are of this type, but some certainly are. And many of the nasty ones fall on founders and startups disporportionately.

Key question: did Ironport succeed in spite of his family sacrifice, or because of it? It's not fair to recommend spending more time with the family without addressing what the consequences would have been.

No matter what, you're always going to be at a disadvantage to someone who is willing to sacrifice more than you, whether that be health or family or anything else. I liked the article but it completely danced around the obvious conclusion which is, "maintaining a healthy relationship with your family is going to cost you time and energy which is going to at least somewhat lessen your chances of success and you have to be okay with that."

Edit: I've realized that my last sentence was somewhat ambiguous, I want to make it clear that I in no way support neglecting your family for a chance at economic success. When I said you have to be okay with it, I meant being okay with the risk of failing.

No matter what, you're always going to be at a disadvantage to someone who is willing to sacrifice more than you, whether that be health or family or anything else.

Not always. If you're in a line of work where your own competence matters, sacrificing your health or family life will burn you. It doesn't take long.

The relevant issue is that most white-collar workers (even programmers in many dysfunctional organizations) are private-sector social climbers by trade and practice, and competence matters a lot less than image for them. If appearance matters more than capability, extreme sacrifice can help you.

>willing

There was an important word there that you seemed to miss. I didn't say that he who sacrifices more will always win, but they do have more options available to them, so to speak. Please don't think I'm advocating sacrificing health and family in the name of success, far from it. I just don't like this post facto moralizing that glosses over the difficulty of choosing between working late on something that might be critical to the success of your enterprise and going home to see your wife and kids.

I think this discussion highlights something very important about any Darwinian system, be it inter-species rivalry or free market competition: evolution has no higher ideals. Whatever is best at domination will dominate; whatever is best at spreading will spread.

People put so much faith in evolutionary processes as if they believe that evolution honors some kind of Platonic ideal. Evolution is a cold process, and it does not give a shit about you or anything you hold dear, unless what you hold dear is conducive to dominance in the specific arena under discussion.

Not to say natural selection is bad or good... I'm just pointing out that it's a value-neutral process, and I think it's a good idea to remember that, especially when we get the urge to derive norms of behavior from evolutionary evidence.

That's nonsense. There are 5 creative hours in the day if you are generous. Some companies are build so poorly that it takes staff 12 hours of being present to access those but that's the failing of these businesses and they will likely die.

There are two solutions to the issue, avoid the issue and hire people crazy enough to put up with the hours or actually build a great company without the flaw. First one is way easier and seems to be working in places like NYC and Silicon Valley, it's really a pity.

Yep..hindsight is always 20/20 when looking through the rose-colored glasses of success. Hope this doesn't give wannabe-founders the impression that they can launch a startup, succeed, all while keeping home life healthy.

When you launch a start-up with significant family commitments one of these outcomes is most likely : relationship and business both fail, one fails the other succeeds...if you have nice VC-cushion or you are already wealthy then of course you can have it both ways.

I don't know why you were downvoted.

This is something I hate about rich people. You're not a better person because you can take 8 weeks off each year and therefore get to actually know your kids. You're just luckier. Enjoy being rich, go ahead, but don't pretend it actually makes you a better person. Making better choices isn't as meaningful when life hands you all good options and few bad ones.

It's like the rich girl in college who drinks and sluts it in 43 countries before freshman year but insists that, because of her superior travel, she's somehow superior to the middle-class schlub who didn't leave New Hampshire until he went to college. Until you're 25 or so, being well-traveled is an accomplishment of the parents, not the person. (And after 25, no one really brags about it.)

>enjoy being rich

Or you could enjoy getting to know your kids. Its not really an either or sort of thing. You could not be rich and spend time with our kids. Unless of course you are willing to sacrifice that to try and become rich, thus closing the circle, trying to become the thing you talk about hating.

Agreed that privilege begets privilege without effort. But I really do not think that getting to actually know your kids is something only the wealthy can do.

> And that part about sitting on my ass in front of the TV with a cocktail? This ran counter to all of her efforts to teach the kids about pitching in as a family. The message of everyone helping to cook, clean, and be responsible for the household fell completely flat when daddy wouldn’t so much as take out the trash or change a light bulb.

Take out the trash and change a lightbulb by all means, but seriously if you're providing for your family, it counts.

If his children don't think he's pitching in by paying the rent /mortgage, then something's very wrong.

I'm not a child expert, but I doubt children can really start to rationalize "dad's not around but at least he's providing" until well into their teens. And at that point the damage from having an absent father is probably done.

I'm not a child expert either but it doesn't sound like it would be too hard to at least start having those conversations once they even realize you are at work and aren't just hiding behind the front door for 8 hours (9 years to them)

It has to be supported by the other spouse. If my wife is working extreme hours to bring in the income, I have to make sure the kids know that's why she can't be here now.

Really depends on the kid's age. Younger kids (less than 10yrs) are not able to grasp the concept of money or earning money, so explaining that dad is out making money for a roof over their head and putting food on the table is not going to cut it. At that age, they just want close interaction with their dad.

I'm happy to be proven wrong and of course this is only anecdotally but I was watching sci-fi movies at age 10 and I could grasp, at least on the surface, the underlying technology and it's purpose. When we say "kids dont understand money" I'm thinking they should start to get it at about 7 and certainly have a basic grasp by 10.

most likely you didn't grasp but just accepted without questioning of feasibility

I didn't grow up with a lot of money so, again anecdotally, I'm pretty sure I had a great respect for what money could afford by that age.

There's a difference between saying kids aren't capable and kid's aren't commonly knowledgeable or taught. I'll agree with the latter but I'd disagree with the former.

Kids will fully understand what is brainwashed (used in a positive way) into them.

If they are raised to believe that work is necessary and the spouse who is with them while the working spouse is away doesn't whine, complain or fight with them about it then they will learn that it is something necessary. And guess what? If they don't that's to bad. You do what you think is in the best interest of your children long term not short term because you won't be around. In no way are they going to understand why you can't be at the ball game or the school play but later if you are out of work and/or you can't pay for their college that they will understand and they won't say "oh that's ok at least you came and saw me make that basket".

When I was 7 years old, I distinctly remember telling my dad "I give you all my money" (my parents never had money, and had a few pretty rough periods). At the time I did not make the rationalization that the money was coming from him anyway, but I sure knew giving it to him meant I would not be able to buy my candies and stuff.

I also didn't really understand what his job meant, but I knew it was among the "stuff that needs to get done even if you don't like it and don't know why you have to", of which I had my own share (cleaning the room, etc).

It was never a (big) problem when he or my mom weren't around for reasons we didn't understand; what mattered was that when they were with us they were WITH US. Reading, telling stories or listening to ours, going hiking or playing sports, teaching maths or showing how to beat an egg.

Really? My 4-year-old gets anxious when I take the day off or even if it is a national holiday. She says I'm supposed to be at work so the family doesn't get hungry. Saturday and Sunday are family days she tells me.

I'm not sure about children being born with the expectation of fatherly company. Historically it wasn't universal. Some native Americans had separate housing for men and for women and children. In other ancient societies men would leave en masse on hunting expeditions for whole seasons. Of course those civilizations were much more communal than ours and contained many more children.

Having children of my own I find very disturbing that 4 year old gets worried about such thing. For sure she didn't come up with that by herself but most likely listening/being told by parents

Or just by having fairy tales read to her, say. I don't mean Disney-fied ones, of course.

If you read those, there's poor people, people starving to death, people out looking for firewood in the winter, etc, etc. And while some kids just accept it as-is others ask questions. Yes, at 4. It _really_ depends on the child.

Children can grasp anything if you explain it to them. A 4 or 5 year old can easily understand the concepts of work and money if you explain it to them.

Many fathers who are disconnected like that at home regret it later. Sometimes because they have a distant relationship with their kids, sometimes because their relationship with their wife suffers.

It does not matter if there was a reason that it happened ("pay the rent"). It just means a life went the wrong direction. And it can't be fixed after it happens.

This is a common misunderstanding in young families, and one that causes a lot of damage to families in the long run.

The misunderstanding is the assumption that the wife was not working all day. IF she has a job, then she was working. If she stays at home with kids, she was also working.

Coming home and relaxing, saying, "Hey, I'm paying the mortgage" is also saying, "Hey, the work my wife did today was worth nothing."

That is a recipe for a very bad, broken marriage. You are invaliding the feelings of your spouse, and dismissing the work she does.

And if you are doing that, THEN something's very wrong.

"If she stays at home with kids, she was also working."

I think it's reasonable to believe that some jobs are harder than other jobs. Staying home with the kids, while hard (and maybe even boring) isn't as demanding as the jobs that some people have.

I have to tell you that I'd rather the person who operates on a heart or a brain or flys a 777 (and there are many more I'm just picking a few obvious ones) focus on their job 100% and get rest to function at a top level. Raising children can be hard but it's a different type of hard.

Edited for clarity..

But the spouse is making sacrifices for you to focus on your career. It's a different kind of hard & still is demanding.

Oooh, that could be a controversial point of view.

I've done a fair bit of the stay-at-home dad thing and I found it HARD. There something unremitting about dealing with the demands of small children while trying to keep the house clean and food on the table (and while my office life was all about getting rid of repetitive tasks, stuff like cleaning and cooking just has to be done again and again, which I found very hard to deal with).

I used to look forward to the days I went to the office; they were like days off.

No, I would never say that "staying at home with the kids" was the easy option.

Very much agreed. For me staying home with my kid is much harder than going to work. It is boring, repetitive, frustrating...mentally draining.

Maybe you should do more fun things with your kid? You could even leave the house together with the kid. A further step might be visiting other people with kids, leaving the kids to play with each other and their parents with time to drink coffee and chat in the kitchen.

Or get an iPad.

True, it might not be harder than brain surgery, but neither is your current job, and raising kids is probably harder than your current job. If you don't give a shit about how your kids turn out, then raising kids is pretty easy, but if you actually care, it's probably going to be the hardest job you'll ever have.

The hardest part is when the kid asks for something and you don't have money.

Really? Geez, that was easy for my parents. "We can't afford it." Getting your kids whatever they ask for is a terrible idea anyway.

Obviously I was referring to basic needs, not to the latest 100-pack of Hot Wheels Color Shifters.

Yeah...it must be pretty bad when your kids have to ask for food and shelter.

Then those people should probably think long and hard about having families, right?

I'm of the opinion that if you really want to devote yourself to a career, you should skip having kids. Interestingly, the same traits that help in career advancement (hard work, willingness to sacrifice) are the same traits that help foster a successful marriage and family. Certainly, a few people can pull off both, but I suspect those people are the exceptions, not the rule.

While some jobs are in fact harder than other jobs, I will bet that being a typical stay-at-home parent with three children (the situation under discussion here) is in fact harder in most ways than being an average 777 pilot. It's certainly harder than programming, and I say that having tried both. Especially if the children are fairly closely spaced and still young. If you think staying at home with three kids is likely to be _boring_ (as opposed to not intellectually stimulating, which is a different story), I have to wonder whether you've ever tried it.

Of course it's a lot easier in the short term to get away with being a crappy parent than a crappy pilot...

> Coming home and relaxing, saying, "Hey, I'm paying the mortgage" is also saying, "Hey, the work my wife did today was worth nothing."

I think you have it precisely the wrong way around.

Assuming someone providing 'is not contributing to the house' assumes their providing has no value.

This is modern feminist reduction of the value men (who most often perform this role) provide, and it's shameful.

It doesn't count.

Your kids didn't ask to be born. You decided to have them. If you're going to raise your kid by simply providing for them, and not nurturing them and spending time with them, then all of your "providing for" is worthless. If you decided to have kids when you could barely afford it, and had no extra time to do anything besides work, then they are right to consider you a bad parent.

Go listen to Cat's in the Cradle by Harry Chapin.

Your culture and values are not universal. Children can adapt to and thrive in much worse environments than mostly only see Dad at the weekend.

Your kind of judgmental attitude is of a piece with the helicopter parent Amy Chua bullshit that makes so many have fewer, more stressed, stressful kids rather than have more and just let them be.

There is more than one acceptable combination of parental responsibilities and time outlays, even in America.

We don't have any obligation to live up to your ideals.

> Your culture and values are not universal.

You're exactly right. There's a lot of crap culture and values in the world.

> Children can adapt to and thrive in much worse environments than mostly only see Dad at the weekend.

True as well. Doesn't make it any less horrible.

Rationalizing away being a good parent is selfish. My mother died when I was 11 and my father (a director in his company) worked incredibly hard to manage the balance of the demands at work and taking the time and care to raise my sister and I. He did an extraordinary job and was very self-sacrificing, and so when I see comments along the lines of "I'm going to do what I want to do with my life and the kids will just have to adapt", it really kind of pisses me off.

Spend time with your kids, sure.

But don't be seen 'not to be contributing' because your partner works at home while you work at an office.

The 1950's called they want their rationalization back! Think of this a different way. If the woman who decides to stay at home keeps the house incredibly clean, the children bathed and well nourished and is there when they wake up, come home and go to bed but speaks to them only once or twice a day is she crushing her role or sucking at it? I'd say sucking.

Your role is to nourish their brains and souls not just cover their heads and bodies.

These aren't exclusive: he can pay attention to his children and keep his 'contributions' to the office.

I dare say I'll get voted down for not being constructive, but I find the self-help entrepreneurship work-life balance stuff on here really self-involved and kind of tasteless.

While I agree with the emotion, there is meaningful discussion to be had. As a sidenote I believe you'd do better to express your opinion without rebuking HN's readership as a whole, under the risk of making your comment just as tasteless.

How dare a person be concerned about their own life and wellbeing, and not whatever minority group is being promoted this week. Why do rich, White, privileged founders think their lives are of any interest on news.ycombinator.com anyway?

I want to relate this to Richard Branson's family advice to Elon Musk sprinkled throughout a recent Google Hangout[1].

> I hope he can find some wonderful people to help him. He's got five children at home, all boys... he just, uh, he needs to... uh, yeah, I hope you can find lots of time. You just got to find lots of people to help you.

I can't imagine the kind of family life Elon Musk can have if he has five boys while running two companies. He advises young entrepreneurs to work 70-80 hour weeks as a clear no-brainer way to get ahead. Hearing the hesitation in Richard Branson's voice in the quote above says a lot about this I think.

[1]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vy9y_YSpYxA&feature=share&t=5...

Wow thanks for that link. Branson had a really, really hard time answering that question. Actually he didn't answer it at all.

At what point in the vid do they talk about family?

55:50

It's easy to write about what you should have done after you've made it through the gauntlet.

Also after you're already loaded. Paraphrasing: I did this and now I'm filthy rich. But if I had to do it again I'd spend more time with my family. By the way, now that I'm rich I do spend more time with my family.

I pretty much am thankful a few times a week that I've never had children. It looks like most of his difficulties at home were due to child rearing tasks; it would otherwise be easy to spend money on things like the yard and housecleaning and laundry, and if spending time with your wife isn't enjoyable in itself, you are doing it wrong.

I guess I should be glad at least some people have children, though.

When I was working at HP, just after graduating from college, the CEO (Lew Platt) announced that he would be stressing work-life balance among employees. He specifically said that he wanted to accommodate working mothers, and especially single-parent families. He officially blessed the idea of job sharing (such that two people could each have a part-time job) and flexible hours, to help in that way.

The particularly poignant part of this story was that he learned the importance of such flexibility the hard way: His wife died from cancer, and he was left taking care of his children by himself. Suddenly, he realized how much work it was to raise children, and he decided that HP should try to take into account people's personal needs, such that they could be with their families and have jobs.

I don't know how deep those changes really went, and I don't know how many of them have continued until today. But those announcements and attempts to help people balance their personal and professional lives have stayed with me for about two decades.

Sure, I work crazy hours (as a freelancer, and also trying to finish a PhD) -- but part of the reason I work late at night is because I value spending time with my wife and children. I cringe when I see startups (and other companies) expecting people, explicitly or implicitly, to sacrifice their family time for the sake of the company except in unusual circumstances. And yet, there's no doubt that for many of these companies, success often does demand more than a simple, 40-hour week.

I'm glad that the original author realizes now that he could and should have spent more time with his family. But I do wonder if he is willing to tell the people working at his startups, "Hey, that program can be debugged tomorrow. Go home and spend time with your children. Software can wait, but they can't."

I've learned to define success as the whole package -- a brilliant career that results to me coming home to an empty house or a house full of people who resent me is not success.

I try make work a 40-hour a week thing, which is often a losing battle. But you need to try and make those 40 hours as productive as humanly possible.

Enjoyed this post - reminds me of something i wrote last year on the same subject http://paulstamatiou.com/simplify/

This reminds me of car ownership... When you ask people if they like their car, most will say yes they do; that is until they decide to get a new one. It's then that they quickly come up with a large con list to warrant an upgrade. Afterwards, they will almost always say that last car was never any good. After all look at the current car vs. the con list of the last. The thing is, they'll be doing this again with their new car until they outgrow it or find problems with it too.

And my point is: Hindsight is always 20/20 when your current perspective conveniently matches the narrative for your newly made situation.

As a founder, it appears as if our startup's success or failure depends on us cofounders. This drives me to work insane hours as some sort of ego self rationalization tells me that more work will make it succeed.

In general I have seen the work/result correlation hold true. And yet, we all know how luck plays its role. I personally like to think some events are meant to happen or not. Especially when it goes bad - when my startup lost a client in the early days for example it was extremely tough... but we learned so much that the next bigger one went well. Would working more hours have changed anything, I doubt it, so there is more to it than work.

More than this, working many hours is sometimes just a way to reduce anxiety of success or failure, at least for me. What's tricky is understanding which hours not to do, how to make more of the ones I do, and being confident that cutting the hours won't affect the bigger picture output too much. Easier said than done.

In my view, this applies not just to CEOs, but other people too. I've seen many around me and myself included, concentrate work so hard to achieve what we thought was best for ourselves and to keep our family happy. However, it would take a toll that our mislabeled 'needy' other halves would bear the brunt off. Switching off from work is absolutely necessary to keep a work life balance going and its necessary to keep in mind that there are other things that are just as important, like our spouses, family and our health, without which all the hard work is essentially meaningless. I personally tell myself at the end of the day that the work never ends, there is always something to do, and it can wait for tomorrow.

If you have children and a career, then you have two jobs. Sorry, you don't get a "break", and you shouldn't expect to "unwind".

This isn't going to be popular, but its selfish as hell to think that you "deserve" something because of all the hard work you are doing. You don't. The universe is indifferent and life isn't fair.

The only thing you can do is make every moment count and do the things that make you happy. If you are feeling the need for a cocktail and an hour in front of the TV, then I'm going to say that you aren't happy.

Thanks Scott. Great post, really resonated with me as a recently (successfully) exited founder. You were the most helpful, empathetic, & constructive "No" I got from a VC.

> When we started pulling consistent coding weekends, we brought in the entire management team to serve the engineers: We brought them food, washed their cars, got oil changes, took in their dry cleaning, and arranged for childcare for their kids in the office.

Sorry, but while admirable, this is not normal. I may differ from most of HN, but I simply don't see the point in making these kinds of sacrifices as an engineer just because I get free dinner or childcare. It isn't healthy...or worth it.

That's not the point. The management team is showing solidarity with their team by serving them in the only (more symbolic than economically valuable) ways that they can.

It's a symbolic (but real) sharing of the sacrifice, not a straight up bribe.

Same reason I've come in on Christmas night (we scheduled the work after the families are reasonably in bed, but the calendar still said "12/25") to spend time with my teams doing major site maintenance activities, or why I travelled with the team for a major as-the-ball-dropped New Year's Eve datacenter migration. It's not because I'm especially good at carrying servers or building SAN racks...

The engineers make the sacrifice because they believe it's necessary for the product/company to succeed. They feel better about it because their executives are physically present there with them rather than on a golf course or diving into their pools of gold coins...

But who plans a New Year's Eve datacenter migration? What kind of major site maintenance is needed on Christmas?

It's one thing if it's an unplanned emergency. It's another entirely if it's planned. Planning for work on Christmas or New Year's Eve would be enough to convince me to find employment elsewhere.

exactly.

Well, we planned a NYE DC move (5 years ago I think), and years before that we didn't have the capability to do certain DB tasks with the site on-line, so we also planned the 2300 on 12/25 work. (And back in 2004, we couldn't even do releases with the site on-line, so we did regularly scheduled releases on Mondays starting at 1 AM with the outage starting at 2 AM...)

How does this happen?

Suppose we find ourselves running a high-margin e-commerce business and needing to take downtime sometime to accomplish some maintenance work. When should we schedule it? Managers and directors of teams in my Ops org researched the expected bookings during various windows and suggested those times. They recommended them to me. I spent some of the planning effort double-checking and making sure the teams would be signed up for that, and got a consistent message of "This is what Ops does; we all knew what we were signing up for when we took this job." (Side note: Of the 9 people on that DC migration trip, 8 still work here, 5+ years later.)

On the 11PM on 12/25 outage, we were upgrading OS on a few key infrastructure servers that were singletons. (We relied on DB and file servers in a way that didn't give us the ability to do maintenance and serve traffic at the same time.)

On the DC move, we were literally decommissioning our main DC and moving those services to a new DC in the same town. We bought and brought online as much duplicate gear as we could, but the core transactional systems were a singleton and needed to be moved, not replicated, and that was going to be 4-8 hours of downtime. My teams chose to put that downtime into a time when we'd lose $1MM of high-margin bookings rather than $3MM of high-margin bookings.

Our CEO, without me asking, was also keeping tabs on the migration (from his house) and sent IMs and emails congratulating and thanking the team for our work when we wrapped things up around 4 AM on 1/1. So, I got to see both sides of it: doing what I believed was right as a leader and being present and engaged when they were doing a less pleasant part of their job, and I got to feel what it was like to get clear engagement and genuine thanks from above, even though it was technically "just" a symbolic gesture. He could have sent that mail at 10 AM the next day, but knowing him, he was keeping tabs on the work not to check up on us or because he was petrified of a multi-day outage, but because he wanted to be able to be the first one to thank us.

Side note: these experiences allowed me to better understand what Ops goes through, and have caused us to prioritize (and since complete) architectural projects that permit us to do almost every bit of periodic maintenance with the site online. We haven't taken planned downtime in several years now, because we've made those improvements. From a pure dollars-and-sense standpoint, those projects "shouldn't win" over larger business opportunities that we have, but they did win, in significant part because they were the right thing to do for our people, and having been there, I can argue for them from a position of first-hand knowledge.

There is an awful lot of negativity and anti-company sentiment whenever inevitable situations come up where, on an instantaneous basis, either the employee can get what's best for them XOR the company can get what's best for it. I don't personally see these situations to be quite the same as Walmart opening at 5 PM on Thanksgiving Day, but I'm open to the idea that others see them as being exactly the same thing.

I understand and respect the perspective of someone who would never do planned work on a holiday, or even those who would never do planned work on a weekend. It's a perfectly reasonable point of view, and I will happily employ those people in roles that don't require off-hours work. Those people will presumably not choose a career in operations, or at least they probably shouldn't.

It is always the case that I speak for myself and not my employer, but it's worth calling that out on this post in particular.

Thank you for the detailed response. It's a good outcome that the sacrifices of systems teams are more widely recognized in your company now; at many companies they are not.

Online maintenance is how we do all our maintenance. Getting to that point as early as possible is essential for redundancy and failover, anyway, so it is both good for the company and good for the systems team.

Online maintenance is huge, and it's somewhat easier to design for now than it was 10 years ago.

It's very nice to be able to schedule releases at a human/humane time and there's really only one point in our release process now where it's impossible to very obviously and fairly automatically revert and regroup. That one point is clearly called out, and the decision is easy to make when the site has been operating on live traffic for 60 minutes with zero perceptible technical and business metrics degradation.

I'd not consider online maint capability to be a necessary part of an MVP, since any time you spend on it is unlikely to help you understand whether you even HAVE a business, but I'd prioritize it pretty highly in the very next phase of company development.

> The engineers make the sacrifice because they believe it's necessary for the product/company to succeed. They feel better about it because their executives are physically present there with them

Really? Your engineers are so easily swayed by having a couple execs present at the office on Christmas eve that they happily ignore their own lives?

"All I do is talk to people all day long and so at home, I’d really prefer not to talk much"

interesting how people feels different about that. I am the same as the author. But my significant other is the opposite. She spends the day talking, giving lectures, and when she gets home, she wants to talk even more, with someone that responds, because all she does is talk to people that just listen the whole day. Turns out to be a good match. we get home, she talks, I listen.

From my observations of having worked around many CEO's is that the job, by its very nature demands total dedication. I believe that attempting to start a family and a funded company at the same time is a sign of a lack of objectivity. It's as if the individual actually believes they can harbor two mistresses at the same time. It's simply not a wise idea. Just an observation. Not trying to make anyone out to be the bad guy.

It seems like I read a story like this several times each month. It is good advice. We all know it deep down. Yet the "I'll sleep when I'm dead" culture of constant work persists. How do we change that? I ask honestly as someone who is reformed. It took nearly losing my marriage for me to establish balance in my life and work. How do we set up an enduring culture of respect for actual balance?

A simple tip is to look for activities that regenerate, rather than medicate. "Sitting with a cocktail" isn't a solution to anything, it's treading water at best. A classic regeneration activity for couples is dancing. Meditation is another great choice, but isn't for everyone.

I've seen plenty of startup CEOs that add value and some that subtract value.

The ones that subtract value just push to meet arbitrary deadlines and don't pitch in.

The ones that add value actively remove burdens (go get lunch) and look to keep people from burning out (send people home or off to the beach).

Urges me to startup before all the relationships kick in my life! Being young certainly helps.

This guy seems like a total piece of shit. He gives little respect to his family or his employees.

Thank you.

So what I'm reading here is why CEOs shouldn't go to the office on weekends and check their mail at dinner. What's glaringly absent from the second part of this article is not asking the engineers to come in on weekends, either. Those guys have families and their negligible equity certainly doesn't justify 80-hour weeks. It sounds to me like the author would rather have gone home on weekends while the engineers stayed at the office.

I had similar impression.

Got the same impression.

I just had the impression that he wished he could have had his cake and eaten it too.

He made the familial sacrifices. He had the business success. Now looking back he wished that he would have magically had that success without putting in all the time. Does not compute.

I suspect he thinks he should have figured out a way to do both and not make it into an explicit trade-off. In fact, I think the entire post is about how "having+eating the cake" is possible if you put some effort into it.

if you put some effort into it

That's circular, though. How could he put yet more effort into something besides his business success when he said that he was pouring everything he had into it?

I would have respected his viewpoint a lot more if he had just said, "I didn't need to make all that money. My family should have been more important and I should have chosen them over the next shipping date at least 6 out of 10 times. If it had meant missing delivery dates and loss of some contracts, then so be it."

> How could he put yet more effort into something besides his business success when he said that he was pouring everything he had into it?

By redirecting some efforts into optimizing the way he handles his business and family, thus making them require less effort for the same level of effect.

Work smart, not just hard. The question is whether or not it would have been possible - and whether or not the compromises he made on his family life actually made the difference between failure and success.

In other words, those emails answered by sneaking off to the bathroom, did they matter in the success of the company, or could they have waited until morning?

Would leaving the office an hour early twice a week have resulted in missing delivery dates and loss of contracts? If they did, were those deliveries and contracts critical to the exit? Did dragging everyone into work on a weekend actually help the company, or was all that hard work (on his part and his employees') actually slowing down their engineering?

None of that is obvious. I dislike the Silicon Valley meme that family and money are mutually exclusive, or that one must necessarily go on suicidal work-rampages for months/years on end to achieve financial success. There is a world of difference between what looks critical and what is critical. I also dislike the notion that a bunch of sleep-deprived, high-strung people who don't have their shit together, staying alive by a combination of greed, caffeine, and blood pressure, is what "working optimally" looks like. It's clearly not.

This whole blog post is basically a post mortem where the author wonders if all those things that he thought had to be done right then, right there, actually had to be, or whether there was more wiggle room than he thought at the time.

He wasn't able to do it as a founder - he changed jobs and found more time for his family.

Each time I read madness as 60h/w, 70h/w or the wtf 80h/w I am really happy to live and work on EU. I think I would fall in depression really fast if I had to sacrifice (because over a certain limit, to me, it is only sacrifice) so much of my time and passion. Also in my opinion, ever over a certain limit (For me is 50h/w), the productivity of an engineer just vanish. I prefer work to live against live to work.

And just think, Americans (and Canadians) also get much less vacation time than Europeans! Geniuses!

I guess the European peons did learn some lessons from all the centuries of oppression under the feudal nobility. The Americans never had that experience, so they bought into the company line hook line and sinker.

If you're going to attribute history to why the workforce in Europe is the way it is, then the American expectation of the peons to work all the time is because the US never got over having slave labour.

BTW that line of thinking is ridiculous. Europeans and Americans learned about feudalism the same way, from history books. No one who was around when labour laws were going into effect has first, second or third hand knowledge of feudalism, slavery or working conditions during the Industrial Revolution.

In addition to slavery, Americans also had The Frontier. A man who didn't like the wages offered had the option to go make a homestead.

European culture is likely to have been far more shaped by feudalism than American culture is. You don't have to individually remember something for it to have an important effect on your values and actions.

It's not like we came over from Europe or anything.

Each time I read madness as 60h/w, 70h/w or the wtf 80h/w I am really happy to live and work on EU

I'm happy I don't live in EU. I don't have to work 80 hours, but if I choose to then that should be my right. Europe is too anti-ambition and its policies reflect that.

Well if you're the boss it's your right to work as long as you want, but it's not OK to abuse your employees and make them work ridiculous hours.

Your boss can't make you work ridiculous hours

Correct me if I'm wrong, i don't know the rules in the us, in Germany you're simply not allowed to work more than an average of eight hours per day. So you can not only not be forced to work more, you can't even be asked to. Even if it seems to be voluntary, often it isn't.

We might have to pass on hiring you, there appears to be a problem with the culture fit.

Yeah, that was the same reaction I had.

I also long ago stopped believing that 80-hour engineering weeks are much more productive than 40-hour weeks. For one week? Sure. Two? Maybe. Months? Nope! Definitely not better, probably worse.

(Why is a long answer, but for one take, this is good: http://www.lostgarden.com/2008/09/rules-of-productivity-pres... But even if none of that human-factors stuff were true, I'd still believe that because the cost of error. A tired programmer can easily be negatively productive, because small errors tonight turn into land-mine bugs that later blow up hours or days of time. 80-hour weeks value apparent productivity over actual productivity.)

All of those people should have gone home. Sense of urgency + stupid behavior + big payout is not actually proof that the stupid behavior led to the big payout. For every success like his, I can find a dozen stories of death marches that led to absolutely nothing worthwhile.

80-hour work week for months is the only option if you are working on your ideas in parallel with stable, paying job. Then you quit and the project is just barely getting off the ground. You worked 80h/wk so far, so you have this chance to double your productivity. In fact, that's exactly why you quit, so it's damn sure that you keep working the 80h schedule. And then it becomes progressively hard to go back to the normal working hours, because it implies slacking.

So it's not a matter of believing in 80-hour engineering weeks and it's not a matter of choice for many people. It's just how things naturally develop when you are starting on your own.

If what naturally develops is not as effective as something else, I would like to think that people would eventually stop doing it.

As I mentioned (and as the links demonstrate) 80 hour work weeks don't double productivity in the long term. They may double the perception of productivity, and they may satisfy one's sense of urgency by never giving time to think, but I have never seen any evidence that they double productivity in the creation of software.

I don't particularly care for what links demonstrate, but I'm sure that people who are forced to work 80-hour schedule are very far from being twice as productive. However having worked under the 80-hour routine myself on my own project for two years I can assure you that it sure as hell helped to achieve a lot more and a lot faster. It's really a matter of motivation. Will I do it again? No ...but then I don't really need to now.

I'm happy to agree that you perceived higher productivity. But there's an open question whether it was more than perception. Tired people, for example, think they can drive much better than they can. A comedy staple is the non-fine person shouting, "I'm fine!"

I believe that for certain sorts of work, 80-hour weeks might be more productive than 40-hour weeks. E.g., digging ditches (at least for the very young and very healthy). But in software the costs of error are so high, and so hard to trace back, that it will take very solid studies to convince me that the increased error rates from long hours really are counterbalanced by the large number of hours put in.

What's glaringly absent from the second part of this article is not asking the engineers to come in on weekends, either.

Exactly. The culture should be 'everybody else' works 80 hours a week and dealts with a nasty commute? But the CEO, lives a couple blocks away and blocks out time here and there to play with his kids...? Ok, There is certainly nothing wrong with this advice for CEOs, but the question goes begging as to wether or not such a "game theoretic" outcome is stable if the strategy is pursued by a broader set of employees. One clue, of course, is in the original story...where work/life balance is a "value" to the company...and the c-level execs are all washing their cars and feeding them pizza...while the engineering team they slave away...on the weekends in the cubicle farm...missing kids ball-games and family meals...etc. WTF. That's one heck of an 'omission' from the problems that face the CEO. And in one sense it is also incredibly narcissistic (literal sense), to be "fixing" your own problems but not those of your team at work. It's so bizzarre I'm not sure I didn't mis-understand something? It seems a glaring error in the essay not to reconcile this part of the plotline. I do give him credit for having at least woven part of it into the story, however.

Got the same impression.

I believe you guys misunderstood him. I think he is not saying he should not have done those 100 plus hour weeks as a CEO necessarily, but that he was simultaneously being a dick to his wife and eventually this probably had some negative impact on his CEO performance, not just on his personal life. What I got out of this is his advice is, try to the extent possible to be present for your family and get rid of "I am a CEO, bitch" attitude when you get home because your wife/husband may not appreciate it very much

No, they got it right. The #1 advice he should have given his former self was to ensure that the company DNA had proper work life/balance at its core. Once that culture was in place, the other things would have pretty much taken care of themselves.

I agree with your statement. He said the company had a great work life balance policy, but his descriptions of it contradicted that.

I agree with you vasilipupkin... It is very hard for both employee and CEO to manage their work and Family Life Balance. But, we do not forget that CEO is the commanding officer of his army and It takes lot of stress and thinking to take a right step for his company future...

But, I have a solution for these as well... Give some of the responsibility to your co-founders means they can take the final decision in that particular area. Through that, CEO can save himself from lot of stress and also can make some time to share with his family...

I wonder if you might have skipped or didn't relate to the 50% - 75% travel part.

In my experience it's not the travel, per se, even though the jet lag can be killer. It means being On 100% of the time you're away. The raw number of hours of being Always On for your company--around the world, with different people in different contexts--creates an emotional distance to one's family, because your mental world becomes intensely focused and 100% only on work, and work issues. Product issues, team, management, all that you can balance, but being on the road is the chaos of (enterprise) customers. They may love you, but they're needy. And all the time you're together, you're considering every word, and interaction to drive to a preferred outcome. It's never a "dinner". It's part of a never-ending orchestration to achieve specific outcomes.

Coming off of /those/ trips, he should have re-engaged with his family, but the challenge is the trips exhaust your mental and (jet lag) physical energy. Re-engaging with family means another "on" time, but it also means the expensive context switch from being able to talk business any time any where, in any state--leaving that mental zone-- to talk about family issues.

No, I don't get the sense he meant only engineers should work hard and CEOs should play with their kids.

I think the message is CEO's should consider forcing family-life onto their schedule, instead of being 100% consumed by work.

Yes, there are other pressing issues, and you might not be able to predict the value, but Scott says take it from someone who has gone though the struggle--it pays dividends at home, and at work.

I can relate.

I'm just surprised he didn't say anything about making his subordinates work less. He said the company had a work life balance policy, then talked about how the engineers were always in on the weekends.

PS-- I'm on the road every Mon thru Thursday and pretty much live in a hotel. I didn't relate to this pierce. It's. Rey possible, then, I don't have the skills to be a CEO.

It's just lip service. The impression I get from reading Hacker News is that practically no SV company has anything resembling a work-life balance. And the "choose your own vacation time" companies are in reality anything but. It's completely disingenious.

I like it a lot better when people say it like it is. Makes me better aware of the situation I'm in and the expectations on me.

Yeah, after the first part of the article I spent the entire last bit vaguely hoping to see the remorse of having implicitly forced the developers and other executives to make the same decision he made, considering that were I in his shoes I'd feel terrible about how I treated my own family life but even worse about what impact it may (even potentially) have had on other people's families since they had less explicit choice in the matter.

Didn't find it. I guess I'd make a horrible modern CEO, I lack the unflinching confidence to be so self-absorbed.

I'm only going to reply to this because so many of you got this impression. My take was "very early on you have to do these incredibly long development hours to ship a product, hit a milestone, and raise" The engineer's were looking at a rough 3 - 6 months of weekends etc. The CEO was looking at a rough 7 years. I'm not advocating that the engineers needed to even do that rough 3 -6 months just highlighting why I think he doesn't show remorse vs talk about the pain of CEO's.

Maybe I'm just unlucky but I've never worked at a startup where pressure relents on engineering after the initial push. I feel on call 24/7 now that we're in production with paying customers.

As I said I'm not endosring it. Just explaining what seemed like a gap for so many readers.

I think you're just unlucky - if my CEO sees me working at 8 pm or later, he tells me to go home, even if we're in a big push. He wants me ready to do more quality work the day after, and not burn out.

Did everyone here miss the part about the importance of work/life balance at IronPort and how HE wasn't living it? Every company has deadlines to meet, and sometimes you have to work extra time. This guy, however, was working ALL the time, not just during those crunch periods.

Indeed: the writer comes off as a major narcissist, with a minor in status display ("Harvard MBA/VP Wife").

I suppose a near-total lack of empathy for your fellow man is, if not defendable, at least an understandable trait for a CEO working an engineering team to death, and then moaning about how "generously" buying them dinner every Sunday night was impacting his family life, until he could cash out based on their efforts.

In my experience, some narcissism is a requirement to be a startup CEO. And I don't mean that in a smart-ass way. The incessant representation of the company seems to require a strong identification of one's self with the company. It's sort of an enabling trait which has some potential negatives consequences. Among the latter would the perspective that sees everyone around them in the company as an extension of their will. Getting to the point of being a "real" CEO also usually requires some more-than-usual self-involvement and identification of one's endeavor with one's self. Good CEOs (by my standards) just have a touch of this. Many have too much. As you indicate, there's a certain logic to it.

I think you are reading into it too much.

Everybody can only speak from their own experience. I don't know Scott and never worked in his startup, but I suspect that what he may be angling at is the fact that as CEO he sets the tone of the company.

I can't speak for him, but I suspect that if he felt like he needed to enforce more work-life balance for himself, he would perhaps do the same for his employees....given that he sets the tone for the organization.

Sure, but in reality they did work 7-day weeks and he did get a massive payoff. To express the theoretical desire to have better work/life balance is meaningless without a sincere expression of which part of his fortune he'd trade for it.

Yeah, I don't think it's necessary to trade anything. I think he is saying, he could have for example, attended more school events AND still had the massive exit. Or, say, after getting home, do the dishes etc. to at least show his wife that he was trying to help. None of that is somehow inconsistent with having a big exit

Last line of the post:

> I also believe this change is actually a much better example of leadership than the one I was exuding. When a leader shows the way toward getting things done and balancing their life, it sets a much better example for everyone else in the company who struggle with it too.

He says it right there.

It seems like he felt a need to put in long hours as some sort of morale-improving service, but he actually damaged the team by doing so.

Bosses should limit themselves to 8 hours in the office, except during times of crisis (and, even in a startup, to be constantly in crisis mode is bad management). If the work calls for more, do it from home. Why? Because if the CEO works 12 hours per day, the VPs are going to feel a need to work 13, the middle managers work 14, and the grunts have to work 15. Now you have everyone working an inefficient long day, and less is getting done (and less reliably) than if people were working sane hours.

You should lead by being available when people need you (which is not the same thing as being a doormat; your willingness to drop other things or sacrifice must be appropriate to the level of the need) but putting in mindless face time just sets a bad example. Low-level investment bankers have to suffer long face time, but CEOs? If your company is going to be a sweatshop where people feel like they need to work 15 hour days or will lose face/status, then what's the point of building it?

Startups don't change our biology or remove the fact that virtually no one can work efficiently beyond about 55 hours per week for more than a couple weeks. (That number includes commuting, housework, errands, and assorted nonsense.)

I'm curious to see some sort of data on hours worked on startups if that exists. I would guess that the grunt workers feel that they are obligated to work ceoHoursWorked + 3 as you mentioned and the ceo imagines she has to work gruntHoursWorked + 3

If I were CEO, I'd probably work long hours, especially early on. But I'd do most of that time from home, so people can leave at 5 or 6 if their work's done. Not because I'm a nice guy, but because I'm realistic and know that working at a sprint pace when it's not needed is going to enervate people and leave them unable to handle a true crisis.

I can relate to this.

I am a notoriously bad multi-tasker and when I'm concentrating on a project I had a really hard time paying any attention to my girlfriend. I also found it harder and harder to relate to the struggles that other people have in a normal life. Trying to add something significant to the world comes at a cost: I might not ever be able to have a normal relationship.

Chances are the world will keep on spinning without your product. Happiness should be your primary goal.

Why do you assume working on his project doesn't bring him happiness?

Also, though I'm sure you are well-meaning, advising strangers how they ought to live their life makes you sound like a prick.

Article is titled: "Success at Work, Failure at Home" and they say they can relate to this. Laments that "...comes at a cost: I might not ever be able to have a normal relationship."

I'm not saying working on their project doesn't bring them some happiness, but they hardly sound like they're as happy as they could be.

And I'm probably just a prick.

I agree with your prior statement (happiness should be your goal, and you probably haven't invented 'sliced bread'). You can't 'have it all' if your work makes you more happy than (or is more important to you than) your relationships/home, you should probably focus on that and divorce/leave/whatever so everyone can move on with their lives.

I read the article as a lament. Although maybe I misread and we're both pricks. :D

advising strangers how they ought to live their life makes

Sorry, my irony meter just exploded.

Letting down his Harvard MBA spouse.

Yeah I can relate to that.

Humblebrag.

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