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