A 60-Hour Work Week is Not a Badge of Honour
jeffarchibald.ca
jeffarchibald.ca
The point of the article is that working 60+ hours is fine, if you need to, but being proud of it is silly. Be proud of the work you produce, not the amount of time it took you to produce it. And certainly don't be proud putting in 60+ hours for some one else, even if they are buying you with stock options.
To be clear, some of us are lucky enough to make money by doing things we would otherwise do anyway, there is nothing wrong with devoting you life to your hobby and have it bring you a ton of money in the process. But don't kill your self for someone else and feel proud about it because you think it's somehow manly to work 60+ hours.
I begun studying in February, just due to my natural tendency to be lazy, I should have started in November too. But the point is that I tried all kind of timetables and ways to study in the next 2 and a half months. Early , late, all day, nothing.
I discovered that for me what it worked was 4 hours at the morning, with a mandatory break every hour.
Then lunch and maybe a nap or gym. Then another 3 hours at the afternoon. Every time I did less I was loosing time. If I did try to push it too much, studying till late, it was time lost sitting but not really advancing. Each hour of studying or writing had a effective time "on the zone" of around 20 min only.
But what´s more interesting is that if I studied more than 7 hours, the next day was almost lost due to my lack of concentration.
I managed to get the 3rd best results of my class, only failing one exam which I had only studied for 2 days. Only two students passed all the exams, and they were sitting very close and they confirmed me that they had been checking results between them when possible (yes cheating).
So I guess that smart studying was more important that time spent seated. Of course there are other fundamental factors, but I actively tried to improve my study routine during that months, and I felt the difference.
Sixty hours a week was a short week in the old days, the conveniences of a modern society allow us to choose more free time should we want it, all you have to do is venture outside of our comfortable environments and you will find people wishing 60 was the max.
Having grown up on a farm all I can say is, you don't notice it unless the wrong stuff keeps piling up. Its amazing how energized you feel when you enjoy the work and don't have idle time to worry.
Do you have a source for that? I find it highly unlikely that the human body needs less rest after spending 10 hours a day performing manual labor than it does after a few hours of programming.
Yes, and then the labor movement happened and we made very good progress as a society towards something more sane and sustainable.
Working on the farm with labor intensive work is totally different from the mentally taxing and stressful tech work environment. That's a whole different topic.
Back when we "employed" children and didn't have maternity leave? I don't think there are any reasons to hearken back to those days.
I work like a madman, but unless you asked me about my hours, you'd never know. I work for a result, and if I ever do brag, it's about the result of the work. The hours worked are the natural side effect of achieving said result.
I would never take a job in which I was required to work 60 hours per week (unless I believed the pay made that sacrifice worthwhile), nor would I expect 60 hours per week from employees on a regular basis.
You'll find me breaking from this sentiment near the 40 hour point (I've been vilified for this on this very site), but I'd rather hire more people than burn them out, which is inefficient and leads to resentment.
People are self-renewing resources, and a manager can either choose to cultivate them as assets, or treat them as a battery, throwing them out when they've run out of juice. I'd prefer the former.
Some of my most productive memories are summers studying and working for 12 hours a day, 6 days a week (= 72 hours). I didn't get tired, burned out, or anything. Another summer had me working at a company making "apps" for 40 hours a week, and it fucking drained me... despite taking far less intelligence and brain effort. I suppose that's not true, the brain effort was constantly justifying why I wasn't quitting haha.
Regarding friends/partners/etc. If the amount of hours you want to work isn't compatible with your partner's expectations... get a new partner. Seriously. Your priorities aren't aligned. I don't know what I'd do if my partner expected me to be home for dinner at 6pm on weeknights... Oh wait I do, I'd get a new partner, which I did. Now everyone involved (myself, previous partner, new partner) are very happy.
Finally regarding productivity vs. hours put in. Again, this is completely irrelevant if you're following the right metrics - results. Long hours obviously don't make sense if they're making you too tired to deliver results. If you're delivering but not in a sustainable way, well, you need to calibrate and lower expectations so you don't under deliver.
In short, people should optimize for long-term productivity appropriate to their goals. This, combined with your unique physiology and work circumstances, will dictate how many hours you should work. Oh and definitely exercise every week.
This is not an option for most us.
Yes, they could leave full-time work and fine new sources of income, but that no longer falls under "just work 30 hours instead".
It just means you have no option but to overwork yourself.
How many facebook posts do you get at all hours of the workday? Assuming their job isn't social media community relations manager, those people aren't working; they're simply attending their job.
He said studios had shown that programmer can work 4 hour/day and plans should be made accordingly (e.g., if you have 16 hours to solve set of tasks, plan for four days, not two). He also said that this statistics was actually proven true during the course of their training and later in the practical application.
Other four hours of "work" time is related to documentation and social aspects of development, like discussing ideas and plans.
If you are genuinely good and the 20 hours represent genuine best-efforts, you're very unlikely to stand out negatively in terms of results produced.
But, you probably aren't as stuck to a 40-hour ass-in-seat job as you think. Find remote work; become a freelancer. Some of those have a higher risk profile than sitting down and shutting up 40 hours a week as an employee. No one said life would be trivially easy, but for those of us that can write code, our lot in life is already 2 or 3 standard deviations above the mean, IMO.
They fully agreed, and yet they still couldn't hire me for less than 5 days. The job sounded great, but I said no. It was a good decision.
Well. I am not sure anything is being imposed here. The original is just a blog by someone stating that working too long (by his definition) is not something he considers a badge of honor/skill/awesomeness. You don't have to follow the recommendation.
Then again, you know, you might be a actual snowflake...
I've gotten the following list of citations in the past, which suggest that the 40-60 hour regime is (aggregated over many workers) optimal for construction:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7089557
But I've never seen anything even remotely suggesting that an individual needs to be an "actual snowflake" in order to productively work more than 40 hours. Since you claim there are "numerous studies", please cite a few.
The key thing you've just conveniently left out is this:
overtime is only effective over very short sprints
Operative words. VERY. SHORT.
And overtime, in the context of the article and all the supporting literature, is working more than 40 hours.
Worst still, you or your employees then become stupid. Unimaginative. Burnt out. They make silly mistakes.
Does that sound like a place that will foster innovation and greatness? Is that the kind of company you want to lead?
Kid yourself all you want with your 40-60 'optimal'. But don't cite actual research that says quite the opposite of what you claim.
Whenever this topic comes up, people constantly claim tons of research showing 40 hours is some magic right number for everyone everywhere in every industry, yet that research is rarely cited. The best I've seen so far is the post I linked to, which is population means in construction.
Man, I hope you develop some empathy before you end up directing others. I've worked for some of these automatons, and it results in a toxic environment with limited productivity. Far more gets done when your people are excited to be along for the ride.
On the empathy front, I can't agree more. Who the hell would want to work for a person that can't sympathize with going home on time to be with family.
http://healthland.time.com/2012/02/14/to-avoid-regret-put-ro...
Take your own advice much?
As you say, results are what impress people.
I'd love to, but no industry in the USA that pays a living wage will put up with less than 40 hours a week, because we fetishize hours-worked...which is another symptom of the same problem.
Two different things are frustrating about this simple homily.
* It's very easy to fool yourself into thinking you can handle things you can't, especially with peer pressure, job pressure and so-forth involved. By the time your health is ruined, your marriage is ruined and etc, it's too late to just say "uh, that didn't work for me". IE, for every "unique physiology", there twenty self-deceivers. I mean, what are the odds? Next, tell me you have "unique physiology" that gets healthier on Cheetos and Ramen (not impossible so it must be true, right).
* The poor result of a permanent 60-hour week aren't just felt by those who make the mistake of following it but by their families and their co-workers.
Sure, freedom. I mean, this article obviously isn't about physically blocking someone from working 60 hours at their workplace but rather encouraging the person to think again whether those 60 hours really make sense.
At least when you take on something that's too much, there are signs of failing or your wellbeing declining.
I don't know if that's true or not. It's probably too vague to be even true or false.
But it also seems like a dangerous sort of symmetry to invoke because the consequences of going beyond your capacities tend to be a lot worse than the consequences of not quite reaching them. I recall you as fitness person from other discussion - what's worse, not stretching as much as your tendons allow or stretching more than your tendons allow?
In the case of work, as noted by the people here mentioning studies, most people can push themselves for short periods. But that pushing is definitely going involving learning to ignore tiredness and such. But you take that skill and use it ignore your constant tiredness, you can get to a really bad place after a while.
In other words, I disagree with any contention that a person's body provides a magic signal that distinguishes between "hard but you can handle it" and "too much for you, you must stop or suffer bad consequences". The degree to which people do harm themselves today shows this.
When I teach stretching and movement, I advice my student to only go to the edge of their "comfort zone" at any one point and I only teach certain stretches. It's known that most people's limberness can be gradually increased so that's relatively safe.
It's pretty well known (see studies on this page) that most people can't "learn" to go without sleep and I wouldn't advice them to try to do so (the point of the article).
And I can believe a few people who in the right place at the right time and brutally push themselves can get rich, rich, rich. That doesn't take away from the point of most people who work with extended years of sleep deprivation screwing themselves up (and this can include a fair fraction of the first group).
Sure, push yourself to greatness. I like to push the quality of my activity, not the quantity anyway.
When Broadcom was nowhere several employees number xxx (with xxx less than 300) were, while in crunch-mode, sleeping in their trucks, on the parking lot, to deliver chip plans on time. Stock options have been good for them the day Broadcom was worth $12bn.
I've got a few friends who started a 3D-rendering business for TV ads, short movies and cartoons. 60 hours a week? Make it 80, 90 and occasionally more than one hundred (you read correctly). I'm talking about people working 15 hours a day, bringing their sleeping bags and pillows at work and eating in a few minutes. They now enjoy 40 employees working for them and have the good life.
I have friends who got money from a business angel and for whom, between angel money and before VC money came, life was work, work and more work.
I could tell you about other people, on the east coast, getting BA money and an office in which they'd sleep (and the girlfriend being surprised to see her new boyfriend living where he works)... And the exit they made selling to a big software company. No 40 hours a week either here but much, much more.
Or another friend setting up a commodity trading (?) company, who's always on the phone and on planes around the world, tracking the ships he's renting and working out deals left and right. Both of us work a lot, yet we find the time to meet (in this or that city in Europe) once in a while.
These people know about burnouts, crunch-mode and... Wealth. Lots of wealth. Yet money wasn't the drive. The drive is simply the desire to achieve great things (build a chip, publish a book, create a company, make an exit, ...).
I've written (and typeset) several books. The last weeks before the book left to go to the editor/publisher were easily 80+ hours a week, working until early in the morning and then taking a few hours of sleep. Rince and repeat. Total crunch-mode. I also know about naps on the bean bag on saturdays and even sundays (!) at Californian startups.
I understand not wanting to work more than 40 hours a week when you're an employee and have a life which you prefer more than your work... But when you're an entrepreneur and want to make a difference, 40 hours a week is nothing.
I'm not saying that there aren't very successful people who've never worked more than 40 hours a week (there are also people who never worked and won the lottery)...
All I'm saying is the entrepreneurs I know who've succeeded big times were (and most still are) relentless workers.
I'm in my forties and I just love what I do. It's saturday, and what did I do? Spent time with my SO, went to buy stuff to paint a room in the appartment, went for a cool drive with my oldtimer and... Spent several hours coding in Clojure..
I even find the time to spend some time on HN ^ ^
You can come with all the studies you want about how 40 hours a week is the limit not to break, unreasonable men will keep being driven by passion and will keep working more than that.
It's not black & white. You want 40 hours a week or, heck, why not 35: try to go to France if you want. Even try to fetch a 4 days out of 5 and you'll be doing 28 hours a week there.
But don't discourage the ones who simply want to work more.
EDIT: fixed a few sentences, not a native english speaker here
Also working smarter requires taking a step back from what you are doing to think about how you are doing it. The ability to do this regarding a task is inversely proportional to the amount of your time you spend on the task. This is why I find 60-80 hours works ok for me but that includes a large number of different kinds of work, and it includes all my personal project time.
To live is to work. To work is to produce things (whether it's dinner for your family or a cool new app). Humans have an inherent need to be creative. But neuroplasticity (ala "Modern Times" with Charley Chaplan) is a real problem here, and if you spend 60 hours a week writing software, you will not be able to step back and really think through how to get more done faster.
if you're in your mid 30s or older, if you work 80+ hours a week there's a significant chance you will simply keel over and die. that's not the good kind of exit.
in my opinion the strategy is to get the bulk of the hard work out of the way when your body is able to handle it, i.e. 20-35. if you're an entrepreneur, you have to have the foresight to set it up correctly and begin a slow process of tapering down the raw clock hours at 30, so that your mid-late 30s and rest of your life can be spent capitalizing on the insane amount of hours you put in during your 20s and early 30s.
In the end the psychologist want to stress the fact that working 80 hours is EQUAL productive to working 40-45, already in the short term! (and they get LESS productive in the mid-long term) With the difference that working the right amount of hours do not cause burn-out and illness.
Again, with a good management capable of understand this, those successful companies would be equal successful today BUT without causing so much pain to their employees back in the days.
Please could you send me a list of anyone who agrees with this. I would like all the money they have made above average wage.
The actual truth is that success is more about luck than anything else. Working 100 hours a week is just you killing yourself without increasing the probability of success more than, say, getting a better-connected CEO would.
There will always be some outliers, but remember, some startups who have done everything wrong, still made it big. Single examples here and there are not data. It's hard work to get real usable data, but chances are some of you know people at Berkeley or Stanford who would be into that sort of sociological/psychological research.
"Money. Lots of money. But it's not about the money. Making great things, like selling a company for money. But it's not about the money."
Who are you/they trying to convince? Nothing wrong with wanting money. But let's be honest, as all your examples are about the money:
* friends around me who made it big
* Stock options have been good for them the day Broadcom was worth $12bn.
* They now enjoy 40 employees working for them and have the good life.
* And the exit they made selling to a big software company.
I have nothing against charities (on the contrary): it just happens that the successful entrepreneurs I do know in person haven't created charities but businesses doing things which bring money.
An example: I have friends who wrote computer games on the Atari ST / Amiga / PC (they were from the "demoscene"). The "goal" when creating a cool game was not to "make money" but to make a cool game, that people would like and play and that would get great reviews (back then in printed magazines). Getting published by a known game company and selling tens of thousands of copies was the icing on the cake.
Writing an "intro" or a "demo" (free for everyone) or a game that's going to be a "product" sold for money ain't the point. The point is about creativity, invention, exploration: it's all driven by the passion for our trade.
There are, today, hard-workers working on startups which are going to be acquired by big companies who do still find the time to work on open-source projects when they get home. These people simply love what they do.
The book I took the most pleasure in writing was one I knew wasn't going to sell well (it was about anonymity on the Internet [not in english], written... More than 15 years ago: when the subject wasn't fashionable at all). Yet I wrote it with passion, without counting my hours and even asking my publishers for more pages than what it was supposed to have. And I made next to nothing in royalties on that book. It's still the one I'm the most proud of.
If you love what you do you won't see the hours fly by and money isn't the drive.
I used the "made money" argument to drive the point that many of the hardworkers I know have been very successful.
(Also, are you by any chance male, under 35 and have no children?)
I'm going to guess that you're not married or have kids because this is the dumbest and shallowest thing I've heard in a while. Why would anyone want to be with you if at the slightest suggestion that you spend more time with them you would fire/terminate the relationship.
First, if you're spending sixty hours a week in the office, you're not only harming yourself. You're encouraging idiot bosses to start demanding the same of other people, which ends up causing real and considerable harm. When your actions start harming other people, that's when it becomes appropriate to respond with social and legal sanctions.
Now you could take a social Darwinist view and say "blow you Jack, I'm alright"; if other people can't hack it the way you can, that's their problem. But the reality is, you almost certainly can't either, even if you think you can. Working excessive hours is like working drunk: it impairs your judgment in such a way that you don't realize how badly your judgment has been impaired, but it shows every time it's put to an objective test.
So yes, if you're spending sixty hours a week in the office, I damn well am going to tell you you're doing it wrong.
I work 8 hour days and get all my shit done, everything. If I worked 10 hour days, I'd probably get a little more done at the beginning but then my productivity would plummet and then I'd just become resentful of it.
...
> Oh and definitely exercise every week.
Maybe it's true; I guess it is clearly possible and some people but I don't think many people could sustain or find it worth it for very long.
For me purpose is to better the world through technology. Others it's through family, friends etc. All play a part in forming a society! A great one too might I add! xP
But when I was younger, I went for years working around 16 hours per day, 7 days per week and everybody thought that I was a rockstar genius. But it was not all mental work. I probably spent about 8 hours a day on software development and then I wehnt home and worked another 8 hours in my half acre of gardens, 3 acre asparagus field or shoveling the daily snowfall of 6 inches or so, off my 100 yard driveway. Not to mention sawing and splitting a few cords of firewood to heat the house, cutting Christmas trees to sell.
The physical work was energizing after a day spent writing software, and the mental work was energizing after all the physical labor that I had done the day before. I'm not saying that the physical labor made me more productive at developing software, although that may be true. But I think that when people count hours and then try to use that to prove a point, they forget to classify what is being done in those hours.
Case in point. When I have a tough coding problem, I don't slog away at it for extra hours. I go sit in a different chair, stare out the window, look at the cloud shapes, then close my eyes and think of absurd ways to solve the problem. Now if I would include that time in my count of hours per day and tell you that I can regularly put in a 10 hour day, you would be misled. The total hours are not as important as what you do with those hours.
If you are going to play on the net for 20 hours a week, then yeah, you may need to put in a full 60 hours. Or you could stop goofing around and do your work. Pay attention to your productivity. Split your day into chunks, take your coffee and lunch breaks. I used to join the smokers on their smoke breaks even though I didn't smoke because it got me out of the chair, moving around, and I got to stand in the fresh air and sunshine (upwind of course). And I almost always go for a walk at lunchtime. This is not a waste of time. These pauses are essential for you to get your maximum mental effort.
Sure, sometimes you get stuck into a problems and go for hours without leaving the chair. Even if you are 50 you can do that once in a while if you eat healthy (read Joel Fuhrman), but the key here is "once in a while". Once in a while you can pull out all the stops, but like heroin, it does not get better by doubling the dose.
Buddha had it right when he said (and I paraphrase him) "All things in Moderation". It takes great discipline, but discipline is what software developers need to cultivate in themselves.
Look at Germany's working hours for the average salary man. They work less than British salary man and are far more productive.
Or, hey, just go live in a cave with your sad, forever-alone 60-hour-a-week self.
What I haven't seen much of is how it affects people who don't soldier for a living or who don't work with their hands outdoors for a living. People like me who code. I'm sure the studies are out there, I haven't taken the time to read them. My guess is that the negative impact of working longer hours to outcomes is even more pronounced, not less.
I can cite an internal audit at a large software company I worked at back in the 00's. They found that having people work longer hours wasn't worth it. Period. It didn't improve linear increased output, it produced a negative output ratio per hour overall, furthermore it increased attrition and problems with engineering implementations. Note that said software company's goals were well aligned with getting people to work as long as possible for the same money and they still reached this conclusion.
So go ahead. Work those longer hours. Just be aware that the all the best numbers we have don't support you doing it for long for any good reason.
But at some point in 1998, for a few months we entered in death march after accepting to be the rescue team for a doomed, undoable project; I've worked 100 to 120 hours a week for 4 months, one of my colleague burnt out like a candle (I remember him asleep the face literally on his keyboard, late at night, while waiting for compilation to end; two days later he lied on an hospital bed) and after that I had serious health problems repeatedly for several years. We had the satisfaction to actually save the project and make the deadline, but two of us ended in hospital, and most on the team had serious family, health of other serious problems afterwards.
So what to say? Know your limits. Don't try to push it to far; it's actually very easy to kill oneself, for instance falling asleep at the wheel, late at night, on the way back home after a very long day.
I'm not saying it's a must - everyone decides for themselves - but some might think it was all worth it even if someone else got all the recognition.
1. Workers that build water and electricity projects are typically unionized and get paid at least time and a half if not double for hours over 40 per week.
2. If those remote villages have gone w/o power and water for years and years there is no good reason to work excessive hours to bring those things to them a few weeks faster.
Nowadays, if anybody finds themselves in this position, take Aspirin every evening as a prophylactic (talk to your doctor) and cut out all junk food. Eat lots of vegetables, and a bit of meat but avoid sweet things and carbs (you are not a runner). If you are into it, try something like a paleo diet. Get exercise sessions spaced through the day (and night) even if only 5 minutes of intensive aerobics at a time.
And look after your fellow workers because you only win this type of thing as a team.
As a team I think we did quite OK. Imagine the tension when you're live in front of 2 billion viewers, and you know the friggin' software just barely works for one hour at a time before crashing, and that one of you must sit next to the director at the main mixer panel while the others are monitoring the screen for the fateful OpenGL glitch, ready to switch machines any second by hand. Then you realise that someone forgot to install the latest software update that we just compiled in the afternoon therefore the running software doesn't manage sudden-death playoffs. And the score is 1-1 at the 90th minute. Talk about pressure :)
Is 'disrupting' an industry really that important to you?
60 hour a week people haven't got that idea yet.
I think the "art of working" is deciding what kind of work you want to do, how big a part of your life you want it to be, and then doing that.
I always find these types of discussions interesting. It's never about things like work ethic, efficiency, or even skill, it seems to devolve in to what everyone thinks is the ideal work schedule for someone else. I have friends that think I am crazy for working like I am now. I don't really care, I am happy, the clients are happy, and my bank account is most certainly happy. But I would never tell someone else they should work as much as I do, or that they should only work 30 hours, or some other random number of hours.
I had to work a 90 hour week a few weeks ago to address a operational crisis. That netted me a bunch of overtime and a week off.
This applies to salaried or consulting professionals of course; if you're working your ass off to build your own business and maybe hit big rewards in the future, it's a sensible choice. Otherwise, you're just busting your health and personal life for somebody else's benefit. Which is only acceptable if you have no choice (really need the money, and don't have the market value to earn the same in a job with more normal dedication).
Many video game developers work 80+hr weeks for well under 100k.
The (perceived?) prestige of being a video game developer makes up the difference.
OK, I don't want to be overly cynical here ... but come on, if you read some of the stuff in our echo chamber ... just don't take yourself so seriously. I mean I know there ideologues are only in startups so they can one day build some utopia in which there is no such thing as money ... but come on. :)
It's more than some "important"; work is how people [with this attitude] values theirselves.
Keep in mind that if you grow up pushed to be the best at school and then at work, there's nothing really meaningful in life outside those areas.
That's where the false dichotomy "being great vs. family comes". Essentially, it's perceived as having something that makes one happy at the perceived cost of "being a nobody".
At the extreme of this attitude the is Japan, where work is taking over the sexual life (there was an article some time ago in HN).
Everything else is secondary.
Note: I use the term "measuring" since you've specifically introduced "metric".
The time constraint is more motivating when you're working on your product full time and have not released yet (are not making any money).
I'm 26, single, and have no pets. I have a family and friends, but I'm very transparent about my work habits and priorities as a full-stack engineer.
Being so young, I see myself as training to be the person I want to be in the future. The best programmers in the world worked at it relentlessly. Sure, there are variances in the amount that they all worked, and some did it with much less work than others. But if I want to be the best in the world, or at least attain my personal upper bound, I have to work hard at it and I have to work consistently at it.
John Resig didn't wake up one day and write jQuery. Steve Wozniak didn't just throw together the Apple I. Linus didn't just decide to write the Linux kernel one afternoon. They all put to work the investments they made in themselves.
I don't do it because I want money, success, or fame. I do it because I deeply want to make a meaningful impact on the world. I want it so bad that when I think about it my palms sweat and my chest gets heavy. When you look at the future of humanity as a whole, we need to either improve or die. And to improve, we need improvers. I want to be an improver and I don't want to rest until I am.
To be clear, I love what I do and I don't really consider it work. Solving hard problems with creative techniques is one of my favorite things to do. I really enjoy learning new things, and being able to pull them into my work is really satisfying. Being able to build something that I imagine, push it out to people, and see them get excited about it is surreal. I don't want to be doing anything else. I don't want to stop working.
But I understand the research. I understand that the work I put in will be more productive and beneficial to me if I have a balance in all areas of my life--which means that I need to be social, have hobbies, and live a healthy lifestyle.
So I've aligned my life such that those interactions still help me reach my upper bound. My friends are smarter than I am and many are in technical fields so getting a beer with them involves talking about a hard problem we solved. My hobbies include writing StackOverflow posts, trying out new frameworks, and reading books like Thinking, Fast and Slow, RabbitMQ in Action, and Secrets of the Javascript Ninja. I truly enjoy and am satisfied with these parts of my life, even though I'm never really leaving the mindset of work.
One day I want to write those books, not just read them, and I want those books to meaningfully impact the world. So I train, and that means I'm an 80 hours a week guy.
My challenge to you is this: What gives you confidence that the impact you'll have on the world will in fact be positive?
Engineering certainly gives us the ability to impact the world. Increasingly and since the first industrial revolution power goes to the greatest engineers. But are the skills that give us the ability to change the world really sufficient to decide what change is best? For that, I believe we need wisdom and understanding far outside our field of expertise, and in the evening and on the weekend we should be reading not just Javascript Ninja but also books on history, philosophy, political theory, literature, and psychology - if we want to optimize the chance that our impact will truly be positive.
When I read this, I realized something was wrong. Psychology isn't a science, and scientific Nobel prizes are awarded for scientific breakthroughs. So I looked it up and discovered that the psychologist Kahneman won the Economics Nobel, which makes more sense (economics isn't very scientific, but it's certainly more scientific than psychology).
A quick search reveals that a psychologist has never won a science Nobel for psychological work. As in the above example, the notable work of some psychologists is recognized by awarding a Nobel in a more scientific field, to avoid polluting the Nobel's reputation and opening the door to awards in any number of other pseudoscientific fields.
But to call psychology a pseudoscience confuses either the definition of science or of psychology. In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman spends the majority of each chapter outlining scientific studies in detail, many that he personally carried out, making the text a 500 page atlas of counter-examples.
It certainly doesn't call into question the definition of science -- that's well-established by a consensus among scientists. The consensus is secure enough that science is now written into law, for example laws meant to prevent Creationism from being taught as science in science classrooms. Here is an excerpt from one such law now on the books (http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/mclean-v-arkansas.html) (there are many):
1. It is guided by natural law;
2. It has to be explanatory by reference to natural law;
3. It is testable against the empirical world;
4. Its conclusions are tentative, i.e. are not necessarily the final word; and
5. It is falsifiable.
Because psychology's topic is the mind, and because the mind is not a physical entity, psychology cannot produce empirical, falsifiable evidence ("testable against the empirical world") to supports its claims. Therefore, based on society's accepted definition of science, psychology is not a science.
This isn't remotely controversial, in fact society is moving away from psychology toward neuroscience as we speak. The director of the NIMH recently ruled that the DSM (psychology's "bible") can no longer be used as the basis for scientific research proposals, for the simple reason that it has no scientific content. In his explanation (http://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/director/2013/transforming-dia...) the director said:
"While DSM has been described as a “Bible” for the field, it is, at best, a dictionary, creating a set of labels and defining each. The strength of each of the editions of DSM has been “reliability” – each edition has ensured that clinicians use the same terms in the same ways. The weakness is its lack of validity."
"Unlike our definitions of ischemic heart disease, lymphoma, or AIDS, the DSM diagnoses are based on a consensus about clusters of clinical symptoms, not any objective laboratory measure. In the rest of medicine, this would be equivalent to creating diagnostic systems based on the nature of chest pain or the quality of fever. Indeed, symptom-based diagnosis, once common in other areas of medicine, has been largely replaced in the past half century as we have understood that symptoms alone rarely indicate the best choice of treatment. Patients with mental disorders deserve better." [emphasis added]
> In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman spends the majority of each chapter outlining scientific studies in detail, many that he personally carried out, making the text a 500 page atlas of counter-examples.
Yes, but these are descriptions, not testable, falsifiable explanations. Science requires explanations, explanations that can be empirically tested and possibly falsified. But because this is a discussion of science, let's prove this point with a thought experiment -- let's say I'm a doctor and I've created a revolutionary cure for the common cold. My cure is to shake a dried gourd over the cold sufferer until he gets better. The cure might take a week, but it always works. My method is repeatable and perfectly reliable, and I've published my cure in a refereed scientific journal (there are now any number of phony refereed scientific journals). And, because (in this thought experiment) science can get along without defining theories, I'm under no obligation to try to explain my cure, or consider alternative explanations for my breakthrough — I only have to describe it, just like a psychologist.
Because I've cured the common cold, and because I've met all the requirements that psychology recognizes for science, I deserve a Nobel Prize. Yes or no?
That's not what falsifiable means.
> I'm a doctor and I've created a revolutionary cure for the common cold. My cure is to shake a dried gourd over the cold sufferer until he gets better. The cure might take a week, but it always works.
Because the common cold has a non-zero mortality rate, you can't say that your cure always works. That statement, taken literally, is provably false, as sooner or later somebody will die even if you're shaking a dried gourd over his body. But lets say that you meant the cure improves the condition of those that suffer from common cold, or that simply we want to find out before anybody dies.
Well, we can do doubly-blind A/B testing and measure several things, like the presence of the associated symptoms, its progression, the average duration and so on. And nowadays, any treatment must beat the placebo effect in order for it to be considered valid.
But lets say that we couldn't determine if this particular cure is valid or not. It would still be falsifiable, because it's related to things that we'll be able to measure in the future, if we can't already - like the autoimmune system's response to this treatment.
> That's not what falsifiable means.
You truncated the original, cut out an essential word, then argued against the edited version. Here's what I said:
> Because psychology's topic is the mind, and because the mind is not a physical entity, psychology cannot produce empirical, falsifiable evidence ("testable against the empirical world") to supports its claims. [emphasis added]
In point of fact, empirical, falsifiable evidence is the only legitimate basis for theories that should be discarded if reality disagrees, and on which the notion of falsifiability depends -- that's how it's defined.
The meaning of falsifiability is that a reality test decides whether a given idea has merit, not philosophical weight or rhetorical argument. And if the reality test fails, a scientist discards the failed idea. A pseudoscientist may elect to discard reality instead.
> Because the common cold has a non-zero mortality rate, you can't say that your cure always works.
Yes, and on that basis I can claim that my idea is falsifiable. But until I take the daring step of trying to explain what I have described, I haven't crossed the threshold of science.
That's why I use this example -- it has empirical evidence, it is falsifiable, it is replicable by dispassionate third parties. It has everything that psychology recognizes as science, except the crucial element of theory, of explanation. Because psychology is satisfied to describe without making an effort to explain, so am I.
What is correct is that experimental designs are more or less not possible in behavioural psychology. This could be OP's second point of confusion. Essentially the only time real experiemnts as opposed to quasi-experiments are possible in science is where a known physical quantity is already well understood (e.g. moles of Hydrogen, quanta of photons, metres of distance, joules of energy etc). Where complete control over a known physical quantity is not practical, the only possible experimental design is in fact a quasi experimental design. However, to claim that quasi experiments are not valid is to deny a large amount of scientific knowledge, and flies in the face of deductive logic.
Next up we have this whole notion of falsifiability. It's a red herring. The discipline of psychology was the original field that enabled the types of statistical analysis that underpin much of the modern economy. Psychology provided the intellecutal basis of using single case studies (e.g patients with a rare or unique illness) to further scientific understanding. In psychology this resulted in much of our understanding of the functions of different parts of the brain prior to the development of neuroimaging.
Finally, lots of concepts in computer science originate in psychology - heuristic being the one that comes to mind at the moment. My entire development methodology is based on the idea that human short term memory is fixed to 7±2 items (based on data from quasi-experimental studies). Thus when I am writing code my primary purpose is to only have to attend to 5 things at a time, at most, as this is the lower bound of the reliability of my short term memory.
Pretend to be a scientist and post your evidence. Here's mine -- the director of the NIMH has recently ruled (http://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/director/2013/transforming-dia...) that the DSM (psychology's "bible") may no longer be used as the basis of scientific research proposals, for the simple reason that it has no scientific content. The director went on to say:
"The goal of this new manual, as with all previous editions, is to provide a common language for describing psychopathology. While DSM has been described as a “Bible” for the field, it is, at best, a dictionary, creating a set of labels and defining each. The strength of each of the editions of DSM has been “reliability” – each edition has ensured that clinicians use the same terms in the same ways. The weakness is its lack of validity."
"Unlike our definitions of ischemic heart disease, lymphoma, or AIDS, the DSM diagnoses are based on a consensus about clusters of clinical symptoms, not any objective laboratory measure. In the rest of medicine, this would be equivalent to creating diagnostic systems based on the nature of chest pain or the quality of fever. Indeed, symptom-based diagnosis, once common in other areas of medicine, has been largely replaced in the past half century as we have understood that symptoms alone rarely indicate the best choice of treatment. Patients with mental disorders deserve better." [emphasis added]
There is often an embarrassing degree of self-reference in discussions where psychologists try to claim that psychology is a science. The defenders invariably see no need to produce evidence for their claim, as though evidence is irrelevant in a discussion of science. And for a typical psychologist, saying psychology is a science is expected to end a conversation, whereas for a scientist, that claim can only begin a conversation in which evidence rules.
> Next up we have this whole notion of falsifiability. It's a red herring.
Only if science isn't defined as it is in the law -- which it is. Science-defining laws are on the books to keep Creationism out of public school classrooms, and while crafting those laws with the assistance of expert witnesses, guess which non-negotiable criterion always appears in the final ruling? Falsifiability.
Here is one such ruling (http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/mclean-v-arkansas.html) -- science must have these properties:
1. It is guided by natural law;
2. It has to be explanatory by reference to natural law;
3. It is testable against the empirical world;
4. Its conclusions are tentative, i.e. are not necessarily the final word; and
5. It is falsifiable.
I bring up this law to make perfectly clear that falsifiability, empirical evidence, and the other standard requirements for science, are only red herrings to people who think they can define science any way they please. For a scientist, obviously this kind of argument is unnecessary -- they already understand what science requires.
> What is correct is that experimental designs are more or less not possible in behavioural psychology.
Wait, what? Because one cannot design reliable experiments in psychology, therefore psychology is scientific? On what basis -- that real science is too difficult?
> This could be OP's second point of confusion.
The only confusion is yours.
You are very long winded, and you present as if you think your understanding is better than it actually is.
I posed evidence, you posted opinion. If you understood science, you would know the difference.
Only if you change the definition of "scientific knowledge" to something much more vague that is not the definition agreed upon by scientists. If you loosen it up to where it seems you are targeting, it lands well into pseudo-science or just religion. By expanding it to include theories that aren't falsifiable, it's nothing more than a circle-jerk because unfalsifiable theories indicate that they provide no information gain to the scientific community and are ultimately worthless.
Oh dear. I've got news for you. While currently not practicing, I have been paid to do scientific work in the past. That makes me a scientist. And according to my professional opinion, your entire frame of reference is wrong.
1. Contradicts some natural laws
2. Is not explained by the natural world except in reference to itself (often due to changes beyond a certain scale)
3. Not necessarily testable against the empirical world (yet)
4. Always up for debate (so good there) as is psychology.
5. Falsifiable or not depending on your stance, in a similar way to psychology, in that there is a lack of complete understanding. The swan example in the wiki article could not be applied for instance because all of the facts and observations are not available (again... yet.)
As for Kahneman (and many other psychologists), if you believe that he starts with the conclusion and refuses to change it regardless of the evidence developed during the course of the investigation, you may have skipped some very important parts of Thinking Fast and Slow. The book in question goes over many examples where the outcomes do not fit what is expected and lead to discovery.
Not arguing exclusively against what you are saying, just pointing out that there are fields that utilize the scientific method, which by their very nature are not entirely beholden to the current 'laws of science' often because their laws have not been fully laid down or explored yet.
Medical science moved past simply treating based on symptoms due to a great deal of work. Who's to say psychology can not do the same? There is still much to learn.
There are fundamental differences. In quantum theory one can craft a theory that makes empirically falsifiable predictions about phenomena not yet observed, even in advance by decades, like the Higgs boson.
The theory is the Standard Model, and it predicted the Higgs boson decades ago. Much time passed because we just didn't have a way to observe reality in the right energy domain. Now we do.
There is nothing remotely like this in psychology.
> Contradicts some natural laws
Not really. The quantum and relativistic worlds are non-overlapping, but both have copious observational evidence, which means we need to look for a theory that explains both of them in a unified way. That search is underway. One candidate is string theory, very controversial because no single string theory candidate is the obvious "final theory".
> Is not explained by the natural world except in reference to itself
This is a non sequitur because it's true for any theory -- at some scale it becomes self-referential. Cosmology, a theory about everything, is self-referential at the level of the entire universe.
> Not necessarily testable against the empirical world
No. Quantum theory is constantly empirically tested and is the best-confirmed theory in existence, both in terms of description and prediction. In fact, the computer you're sitting at represents a confirmation of quantum theory.
There is no other scientific theory that has so much agreement between an abstract theoretical construct and careful observation. During the debates that led to modern quantum theory, Einstein and his group (the critics) posed any number of seemingly absurd objections to quantum ("... and that would be a perfectly absurd outcome"), but each of the objections turned out to be true -- entanglement, superposition of states and others.
There are some quantities predicted by quantum theory that have been confirmed in experiment to ten decimal places -- an outcome unmatched by any other scientific theory.
Title: "The Most Precisely Tested Theory in the History of Science"
Link: http://scienceblogs.com/principles/2011/05/05/the-most-preci...
Quote: "Experimental tests of QED measure small shifts, but to an absurd number of decimal places. The most impressive of these is the “anomalous magnetic moment of the electron,” expressed is terms of a number g whose best measured value is: g/2 = 1.001 159 652 180 73 (28) ... Depending on how you want to count it, that’s either 11 or 14 digits of precision ..."
> Falsifiable or not depending on your stance
Definitely falsifiable. There was much discussion before confirmation of the Higgs that its absence would constitute a falsification of much of the Standard Model, which is technically accurate and was a matter of much speculation before the results were in.
Quantum theory is eminently falsifiable in the classic sense, persistently resists falsification, and is the cornerstone of much of modern technology.
> As for Kahneman (and many other psychologists), if you believe that he starts with the conclusion and refuses to change it regardless of the evidence developed during the course of the investigation ...
Wait, I never said that and I don't hold that view. What I said was that Kahnemann's work describes, it doesn't explain. It is in the area of explanation that psychology fails. To explain (and to put it simply), psychologists would have to seek out root causes of behaviors, but that would require the mind to be a physical organ, open to empirical observation. This is why society is moving away from psychology toward neuroscience -- the chance to offer an empirical, falsifiable explanation.
(What follows should clearly demonstrate the difference between description and explanation.)
Neuroscience is in a rather primitive state, but there are some very encouraging signs. Depression, for example, a condition that psychology can't really treat in a way that distinguishes actual results from the placebo effect.
In a recent neuroscience study, a brain area known as Area 25 has become a matter of much interest because deep brain stimulation of Area 25 can cause a patient's depression to lift instantly.
Title: "A Depression Switch?"
Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/02/magazine/02depression.html...
Quote: "Deanna later described it in similar terms. "It was literally like a switch being turned on that had been held down for years," she said. "All of a sudden they hit the spot, and I feel so calm and so peaceful. It was overwhelming to be able to process emotion on somebody's face. I'd been numb to that for so long.""
I emphasize that the patient in this procedure repeatedly experienced a dramatic improvement for reasons she could not see, by means of actions out of her sight. Until this procedure, she had been so depressed that she had given up on life and voluntarily submitted herself to institutionalization.
> Medical science moved past simply treating based on symptoms due to a great deal of work. Who's to say psychology can not do the same?
That's easy to answer -- psychology's topic is the mind, which, because it is not a physical thing, cannot be a source of empirical evidence. And surely, given the present confidence crisis, if psychologists could produce empirically verifiable, testable results accompanied by explanations, they certainly would. But they cannot.
When it comes to treatments of all kind, all of them are falsifiable, as long as the treatment involves the promise of effects that we can observe either now or in the future. Mental illnesses are very much real and because of that it is entirely possible to measure the effectiveness of a psychological treatment.
The problem with many psychological treatments is the same problem we have with nutrition - doing studies is excruciatingly hard because the validity of a test is compromised if the patients aren't kept under observation 24/7, because patients have a tendency to lie or to forget, so short of keeping them locked in a cage for the next 10 years, we lack the capability of keeping them under observation and this is necessary to eliminate variables that could have an impact on the result. Doubly-blind tests are also excruciatingly hard sometimes - for example, in regards to nutrition, the only way one could conduct such a test would be to control the patients' basic senses. And in the future, we may be able to directly measure the body's reaction to a treatment, which would eliminate the need for A/B testing entirely.
Bottom line is that us being unable to measure the effectiveness of a treatment, doesn't make that treatment unfalsifiable.
Not in science. In science, falsifiability means the failure of an empirical test, a failure that invalidates a claim.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability
Quote: "The concern with falsifiability gained attention by way of philosopher of science Karl Popper's scientific epistemology "falsificationism". Popper stresses the problem of demarcation—distinguishing the scientific from the unscientific—and makes falsifiability the demarcation criterion, such that what is unfalsifiable is classified as unscientific, and the practice of declaring an unfalsifiable theory to be scientifically true is pseudoscience. This is often epitomized in Wolfgang Pauli famously saying, of an argument that fails to be scientific because it cannot be falsified by experiment, "it is not only not right, it is not even wrong!"" [emphasis added]
> At its essence, a theory is falsifiable if it is possible to come up with an argument that proves the theory to be false.
No, falsifiability in science means that an empirical test -- a test against reality -- proves a claim to be false. In science, falsifiability is not about philosophy or rhetoric, it is about empirical tests.
> When it comes to treatments of all kind, all of them are falsifiable, as long as the treatment involves the promise of effects that we can observe either now or in the future.
In psychology, defined as study of the mind, none of those are falsifiable in a scientific sense, because the mind is not a source of empirical evidence.
> The problem with many psychological treatments ... [etc.]
Your paragraph explains why psychology is not and cannot be scientific.
> Bottom line is that us being unable to measure the effectiveness of a treatment, doesn't make that treatment unfalsifiable.
On the contrary, that is exactly what it means. No objective empirical evidence on which similarly equipped observers can agree, ergo no falsifiability, ergo no science.
In any case, falsifiability is only one missing property in psychology. Another is psychology's tendency to be satisfied to describe what it should be explaining. Are testable, empirical explanations required for science, or are descriptions adequate? To find out, read my description of a phony cure for the common cold posted above. It shows that explanations are a requirement for science, and to avoid all sorts of quackery.
That is a false statement, your mind is quite physical!
(and indeed you call upon neuroscience in your very next line!)
> That is a false statement, your mind is quite physical!
Citation needed. No responsible practitioner in the field of psychology argues that the mind is a biological organ or an empirical part of physical reality.
> and indeed you call upon neuroscience in your very next line!
Now I see what I'm up against. Neuroscience studies the brain and nervous system, not the mind.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience
Quote: "Neuroscience is the scientific study of the nervous system."
Huh? What psychologists do you go to, ones only attached to churches?
I'm not going to bother arguing against mind body dualism[0], I have better things to do with my time! I am however confused, you bring up criticisms of a field not acting scientifically, but it appears you are then arguing in favor of pseudoscience of the worst sort, unless I have misconstrued your position.
[0]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dualism_%28philosophy_of_mind%2...
Good idea, you aren't qualified. Meanwhile, the mind is not a physical organ and it cannot be relied on to produce empirical evidence or falsifiable theories. This is a burden on psychology, it has been since the beginning of the field, and it explains why psychology has been determined not to be a science by scientists:
Title: "Why psychology isn't science"
Link: http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jul/13/news/la-ol-blowback-...
Quote: " Psychology isn't science. Why can we definitively say that? Because psychology often does not meet the five basic requirements for a field to be considered scientifically rigorous: clearly defined terminology, quantifiability, highly controlled experimental conditions, reproducibility and, finally, predictability and testability."
The above explains why psychology is being replaced by neuroscience, the study of the nervous system. This change means we can gather actual data and shape real theories.
Psychology's job has been one of categorization. It is fancy pattern recognition that some poor fools thought had actual meaning behind it. Now it turns out it also managed to realize that if you poke and prod someone in a certain way that occasionally a positive change can take place. Of course I'd argue that change has a real, physical, and measurable impact, just that we lack the tools to completely measure it in a non-destructive fashion! Thus, as you mentioned, actual scientists are coming along and fixing things up properly, but it is going to take some time.
> The above explains why psychology is being replaced by neuroscience, the study of the nervous system. This change means we can gather actual data and shape real theories.
Well yeah, we agree on that part. I am just confused as to your seeming insistence as to the existence of something non-physical. I can grok taking that position if one is a religious nutter, but your website[0] makes you out to be an individual who is well grounded in reality.
[0]Upon further research you appear to have been someone's whose software I used while growing up.
Wait, hold on, I didn't invent the mind, psychologists did. I'm simply pointing out that the subject of psychological work doesn't have a physical existence.
I'm certainly not arguing that the mind "exists outside the physical realm". I'm arguing that psychology needs to reconcile their insistence that psychology is a science, with the nonphysical, non-empirical subject of their investigations.
> I am just confused as to your seeming insistence as to the existence of something non-physical.
Wait, hold on. I'm not arguing that the mind exists on a non-physical plane, that's psychology's claim -- I'm objecting to it, as do most scientists.
Title: "Why psychology isn't science"
Link: http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jul/13/news/la-ol-blowback-...
Quote: "Psychology isn't science. Why can we definitively say that? Because psychology often does not meet the five basic requirements for a field to be considered scientifically rigorous: clearly defined terminology, quantifiability, highly controlled experimental conditions, reproducibility and, finally, predictability and testability."
> Now it turns out it also managed to realize that if you poke and prod someone in a certain way that occasionally a positive change can take place.
Yes, but without an explanation, that outcome can't rise to the level of science. Science requires explanations, mere descriptions won't do. If I say, "The night sky is filled with little points of light", that's a description, not very useful. But if I say, "Those points of light are actually distant thermonuclear furnaces like our own sun," that's an explanation, it's testable and falsifiable, and I've crossed the threshold of science.
Ah OK, I was obviously confused.
All the psychologists I have known have admitted that they are just an inaccurate subset of neurology, none of them would follow the concept of "mind", I tend not to bother dealing with people who go for mind/body dualism!
Any psychologist who is an atheist and a skeptic pretty much has to come to the same conclusions. Meh.
Psychology is defined as the scientific study of mental functions and behavior--not the mind. Therefore, since scientists publish peer-reviewed scientific papers with empirical, falsifiable, evidence for theories about mental functions and behavior, Psychology is a science.
And as I said before, in Thinking, Fast and Slow Kahneman outlines many of these studies, and the citation section of his book serves as an atlas of counter-examples to your position.
I've refuted the central point of your argument, and therefore have no logical obligation to address the rest of your points. If you intend to argue, you must necessarily refute my claim by proving the studies I cite in my argument either are not scientific or do not concern mental functions or behavior.
It's a long list so if I were you I would get up early, eat my Wheaties, and instead of trying to prove me wrong, think about how ridiculous you carried yourself in this thread.
Let's look up the definition of psychology and see if it corresponds to your claim:
Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychology
Quote: "Psychology is an academic and applied discipline that involves the scientific study of mental functions and behaviors."
No denial that the mind is the focus of psychological research -- not surprising, since the word "mental" fully acknowledges the role of the mind. This means psychology relies on the mind for its content. And the mind cannot produce empirical evidence.
Next Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychology#Criticism
Quote: "Criticisms of psychological research often come from perceptions that it is a "soft" science. Philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn's 1962 critique[68] implied psychology overall was in a pre-paradigm state, lacking the agreement on overarching theory found in mature sciences such as chemistry and physics."
"Because some areas of psychology rely on research methods such as surveys and questionnaires, critics have asserted that psychology is not an objective science. Other concepts that psychologists are interested in, such as personality, thinking, and emotion, cannot be directly measured[69] and are often inferred from subjective self-reports, which may be problematic."
Gee, that sounds familiar.
> Therefore, since scientists publish peer-reviewed scientific papers with empirical, falsifiable, evidence for theories about mental functions and behavior, Psychology is a science.
Not without the empirical evidence that the mind cannot produce, or an effort to shape empirical, testable, falsifiable theories. But don't take my word for it -- because this is a discussion of science, let's try a thought experiment -- let's say I'm a doctor and I've created a revolutionary cure for the common cold. My cure is to shake a dried gourd over the cold sufferer until he gets better. The cure might take a week, but it always works. My method is repeatable and perfectly reliable, and I've published my cure in a refereed scientific journal (there are now any number of phony refereed scientific journals). And, because (in this thought experiment) science can get along without defining theories, I'm under no obligation to try to explain my cure, or consider alternative explanations for my breakthrough — I only have to describe it, just like a psychologist.
Because I've cured the common cold, and because I've met all the requirements that psychology recognizes for science, I deserve a Nobel Prize. Yes or no?
> And as I said before, in Thinking, Fast and Slow Kahneman outlines many of these studies, and the citation section of his book serves as an atlas of counter-examples to your position.
False. These are descriptions, not explanations, and they do not shape an "overarching theory", for the lack of which every commentator has criticized psychology for decades. Science requires explanations. I should tell you that this is not a new argument -- it's been put forth any number of times in the history of psychology, most recently by the director of the NIMH in his recent ruling that the DSM may no longer be used as the basis for scientific research proposals, for the simple reason that it has no scientific content (http://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/director/2013/transforming-dia...).
> I've refuted the central point of your argument ...
You have done nothing of the kind. You do realize, don't you, that scientific discussions must be accompanied by evidence, yes? Where is your evidence that mind studies can produce empirical evidence or theories?
Where is the physical location of the mind? Where is the objective evidence in support of any part of psychological research, on which different observers are forced to agree? If I attach electrodes to a brain, do I connect to the mind, or have I crossed over into neuroscience, a separate field?
More evidence for the fact that psychology is not science --
Title: "Why psychology isn't science"
Link: http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jul/13/news/la-ol-blowback-...
Quote: "The dismissive attitude scientists have toward psychologists isn't rooted in snobbery; it's rooted in intellectual frustration. It's rooted in the failure of psychologists to acknowledge that they don't have the same claim on secular truth that the hard sciences do. It's rooted in the tired exasperation that scientists feel when non-scientists try to pretend they are scientists."
"That's right. Psychology isn't science."
"Why can we definitively say that? Because psychology often does not meet the five basic requirements for a field to be considered scientifically rigorous: clearly defined terminology, quantifiability, highly controlled experimental conditions, reproducibility and, finally, predictability and testability."
> ... and instead of trying to prove me wrong ...
If you had any understanding of science, you would know that:
1. The burden of evidence is not mine, it is yours.
2. The claim that psychology contains science somewhere is unfalsifiable in the same way, and for the same reason, that claims of Bigfoot sightings are unfalsifiable, for reasons given here:
Title: "Russell's teapot"
Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell's_teapot
Quote: "Russell's teapot, sometimes called the celestial teapot or cosmic teapot, is an analogy first coined by the philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) to illustrate that the philosophic burden of proof lies upon a person making scientifically unfalsifiable claims rather than shifting the burden of proof to others ..."
> ... think about how ridiculous you carried yourself in this thread.
Guess what? Shifting away from legitimate arguments to argumentum ad hominem is a widely recognized acknowledgement of defeat.
In the citation section of the book. Until you refute this evidence, the claim "scientists publish peer-reviewed scientific papers with empirical, falsifiable, evidence for theories about mental functions and behavior" stands.
All I will do is put in a word that most people who start down that track don't finish, but they still get a chance to change the world. Their chance comes through the coworkers they mentor, the spouses whose less-profitable careers their high-paying programming jobs support, and the children who they raise with, hopefully, some psychological balance.
Remember that this path is just as hard, requires as much thinking and practice, and is mastered by just as few people. For now, if you don't think that's what you're called to, great. But there's nothing to be embarrassed about if you find out later that it is.
And if you get to that realization, approach the rest of life with the same zeal you poured into becoming a technical expert, plus perhaps a bit of new-found humility. Practice constantly, seek help from books and from people who have thought about the problem extensively (religious leaders, therapists, or trusted friends), and remember that you're in training as an excellent person to be.
(Edit: I guess I should also say, I'm not sure the options are exclusive. I've read the books you mention, I've spoken at JSConf, and I've built some really incredible things, all while never regularly working more than a normal workweek.)
Do you really think that you're telling him something he doesn't already know?
Some people are served well by humility, others aren't. Just because humility and practicality works for you (and me, I might add) doesn't mean that it's the approach for everyone.
I understand that some people people who attempt one of these goals will fail through lack of effort, intelligence, or luck. But I want to help people not devote their lives to one of these goals just because they don't see the other options or know themselves well enough to see that they're working hard in the wrong direction. I don't judge or disagree with anyone's informed choice, but you can't be informed if you only see two models of success and not other roads to a happy life.
I just thought I'd post a public reminder, and hope a few people find it useful.
(Edited: pretty sure it was clear what I meant, alexeisadeski3, but made it even clearer.)
Seems a bit presumptuous to judge how others choose to live their lives...
I pity these poor fools, who thought Exchange was their only option...
I had that exact same attitude when I was 26 and single and had no pets. "I'm going to get awesome at embedded C++ programming, work my ass off in my 20s so I write world-changing software in my 30s and I can retire in my 40s." No pain, no gain, live at work, 80 hour days, all night caffeine and coding sessions. F-yea! I'm a varsity software jock training for the Career Olympics!
Almost 2 decades later, a family to take care of, a little fatter, a little less healthy, a lot more tired, I look back and what difference did it make? There are a bunch of gadgets out there with my software in it. Am I retired? No. Did I change the world? No. Did I invent the next Linux? No. At least for the companies I worked for, my tireless efforts made the shareholders a bit more money, but that's about it.
Look at it by the numbers. Suppose 1 out of every 10,000 jobs out there offer you the opportunity to reach whatever your goals are (ultra-wealth, change the world, create something awesome, whatever your goal is). I think 1 out of 10,000 is EXTREMELY generous given all those "opportunities" out there to build yet-another CRUD web app or yet another B2B IT portal or yet another crappy plastic consumer product. The career lifespan of a software engineer is (again generously) 40 years. If you're an extreme job hopper you can probably try something new once a year. So you have 40 at-bats.
So,
P(home run) = 0.0001
N = 40
P = 1 - (1-P(hr))^N = 1 - (1-0.0001)^40 ~0.4%
So the likelihood of you lucking into that one life-changing opportunity throughout your entire career as an engineer is minuscule. Unless you really think you can both identify the next Facebook before it happens and land a job there while they're tiny. A lot of people think they can do that. A lot of people also think they can pick stocks, predict horse races, or read tea leaves.
I'm not writing this to discourage you, but do understand that the extreme hours you are putting in now are a bet against enormous odds. Don't end up a jaded burnt out 40 year old engineer.
Looking at the failure rate of startups of 82% as a first timer, by starting your own company you have just 40-folded your chances to success.
There are several other numbers out there, but it's all in the 75%-90% range. So 10% chance to become a millionaire, thus free to do everything you want and I will learn so much in the meantime? I take it.
There are 168 hours a week. Say you sleep for 8 hours per day. That takes up 56 hours, leaving 112 hours. If you legitimately work for 80 hours, that leaves 32 hours of downtime a week, or roughly 4.5 hours per day. That's only 270 minutes (it's closer to 4.6 hours, but that is only 276 minutes).
270 minutes a day. What can you accomplish in that time? Is there enough left over to stay sane?
Of course, there are plenty of variables to play around with. Sleep 6, and that's an extra 14 hours a week. Now you have plenty of downtime. Over the long run, is stealing these two hours away from your sleep beneficial? Maybe for some. Are you in that category. Are you sure? Really?
Doesn't follow. I consider myself to be on a similar path, perhaps with a touch less passion than yourself. I wish for my future work to be meaningful and beneficial for many, but I don't necessarily ache to "make a meaningful impact on the world." That can be done almost trivially by being kind and helpful to those around you. It doesn't have to be some epoch creating achievement.
I study. I read similar books to you. My end goal is to be really good at what I do, but I don't need to spend 80 hours a week doing it. Are you going to get there faster? I'm not so sure.
One thing that really stuck out to me about your comment:
> So I've aligned my life such that those interactions still help me reach my upper bound. My friends are smarter than I am and many are in technical fields so getting a beer with them involves talking about a hard problem we solved.
Do you never take a break? I go out with great friends that are entirely non-technical, and often never discuss a technical matter all weekend. I don't even think about how "smart" they are. I don't expect my friends to be smarter than I am. I hang out with smart people on occasion, but it's not a requirement.
[Edit: Just to be clear, what I am trying to get across in the above paragraph is my surprise that your choices targeting balance, your social interaction and hobbies, are calculated to derived benefit. Take it when you can, but what you're attempting sounds overbearing. Enjoy some downtime. Don't even think whether it is beneficial or not. What are you missing out on because it's seemingly not beneficial? I would argue: a lot.]
I spend hours reading great fiction with no technical information to be gained. My hobbies are completely divorced from what I want to get great at, and I strive to become good, not great, at them. Yet, I never feel like my true passion suffers.
Then my daughter was born, and while I had no real idea of why on Earth would a 3 months old baby who cannot really communicate in any meaningful way change anything -- I became a different person, so much happier than I used to be. :)
I'm so glad he came along when he did, because I was on my way down the dangerous road of workaholism; but now my priorities are crystal clear, and I refuse to work more than 40 hours/week on a regular basis.
And this is coming from someone that used to work as much as you when younger.
Later "frameworks" and "ninja". Oh dear.
get over yourself, bud.
Rick, you need to be really careful what you wish for, because you might just get it.
By the looks of it, it isn't a matter of if, but when. If you bet your whole life on work, and then work starts biting you in the ass (which it will over a long enough timespan) then what will you do? What other areas will you be content in to carry you through?
The real benefit of balance is being able to shift your focus among various areas of your life to weather the storms of life.
A technical piece of advice: develop your taste for languages and constructing software beyond what Industry tells you.
Is it more effective to grind away relentlessly or could you spend that time more efficiently and eliminate unimportant tasks?
Are great ideas more likely to be obtained by long hours in front of a computer, or would it be better to spend some of that time away from the studio?
I did something similar to you. But before I did the change I was burnt out and very depressed (I was at an extremely low point of my life). I don't regret it.
Believe me. Do some creative destruction. And come back in two-three years time.
The problem with this is the guy is addicted to working weekends. He's been doing it for years and it makes everyone else look like "slackers", despite his obvious burnout.
The problem I see is that it slowly becomes the new norm and benchmark, regardless of whether long hours are productive. These new expectations then get encoded in cultures that devalue those who either choose to spend time on other things or who are simply more efficient.
Do we just need to find better measures of output and figure out what fair compensation for average output is?
Of course your interpretation is more likely.
One argument in favor of capping work hours: unrestricted overtime discriminates against workers unable or unwilling to compete. A race to the bottom is not in the long-term best interests of any participant or the society.
An imbalance in society might show up as (under|un)employment in groups outside the core demographic -- in this case, anyone who is non-20-something, non-male, or non-white, who is not "crushing it" at work after nine on weeknights.
Here's my issue: I'm an entrepreneur. Doing a startup is my dream. I'm having fun and creating amazing memories. I work as much as I possibly can. Stopping me from working on my startup is like keeping a child locked in a room. I don't force my team to do the same (and they don't). I don't brag about it, I am not burning out, not messing with my sleep, not jeopardising my health. Moreso, when I force myself to stop it takes me a long time to start again. That's how my brain works. Why is 40 the golden standard? Do I have to apologise for the amount of work I do?
We should be very careful when we're talking about employees though.
Back in the day, I was a salaryman. A Japanese megacorp owned me body and soul.
If you had asked me, during much of those three years, whether I was overworked, I would have told you no. Seventy hours was surely not more than many salarymen worked, and anyhow, I had just had a nice relaxing 50 hour week only... what month is it again? I would have described myself as an attentive boyfriend, and didn't understand at all why a girlfriend might disagree with that assessment. My best friends had an album titled Patrick Falling Asleep At Parties -- they were such kidders, those two. I had blackouts. I stayed in a hotel frequently, some days because it was impossible to catch the last train but some days because while I technically could have made the train I was staggering so much I was uncertain that I'd make it home safely. Somebody once did a graph of HN posts by hour it was utterly impossible to identify core sleep hours for me by looking at it, for three years. When my salaryman friends and I got together for dinners we'd do the requisite amount of kvetching about our jobs and then talk about people who had real problems. Did you hear about how bad it gets at the Tokyo office? Cripes, we dodged a bullet, didn't we.
In hindsight, I can only describe it as three years of temporary insanity.
I don't want to attack any part of your self-conception, and wish only for your happiness. In that spirit: consider the possibility that alexandros is executing on unreliable hardware and attempt to get verifiable external measurements about what that hardware is telling you.
I am indeed very much aware I am running on unreliable hardware. My evaluation of my productivity comes from reviewing things done in micro and macro scale, as well as feedback from people around me. Seeing my HN history from PhD years to Startup years is night and day. I've even installed RescueTime to get a better idea of how I spend my time. I try to get as much external data as possible, always happy to apply any other (sensible) metric you (or others) can suggest.
But keep in mind these same considerations hold for everyone claiming they're super-productive in 40 hours a week.
> I don't force my team to do the same (and they don't).
For anyone who does work at all hours, before and after the traditional workday, I would just kindly remind you to be cognizant of the messages you send to your team if you're firing off emails and sending other work products every other night at 10pm and every morning at 5am. While you don't mind doing it for yourself, and externally you tell everyone you don't expect the same, it does begin to put informal social pressure on everyone else. This is particularly true if one or more employees start responding/emulating those odd-hour communications, out of drive or a sense of unspoken obligation, which pushes everyone else into a "I do this but you don't have to [but really you should wink wink]" situation. Even if people don't match behavior, it can lead to stress.
In short: be aware of the pressure your behavior can send irrespective of your words, in light of your position of authority.
1. guy A who want to work just 30hrs a week can say that this is how much he wants to work and get paid a fair hourly rate (same as guy B if he's just as good)
2. guy B who wants to work 70+hrs a week can say that this is how much he wants to work and get the same fair hourly rate (same as guy A if he's just as good, a reasonable 25% more for hours worked about a certain threshold - let's say 40hrs per week mandated, to set an arbitrary bar and stimulate employment of more people over exploitation)
3. guy A and B can have a coffee together and both see each other as equal value guys but with different life priorities, both ok
4. employers will not favor type B guys over type A guys (if this happens, mandatory extra-payment for overtime or extra-taxation could sway things to an equilibrium).
...it all boils down to Bertrand Russel's idea: why not have two people working X hrs a day instead of one guy working 2X hrs a day, and at the same time let the guy who wants to work 2X do it but don't discriminate in his favor (http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html).
This happened to me recently. More than 70h per week.
But that's not. The fact of the matter is, I was the sole programmer on the product and the product is so attached to me that if it fails, I fail.
I don't see it that way, but the employees at the place I work at do. The clients who were brought in to meet me, do.
1) Sending out team wide emails very late at night and on the weekends
2) Sending out team wide code reviews very late at night and on the weekends
3) Monday morning during scrum standup mentioning "Over the weekend I did..."
I believe the above behavior is eventually toxic to a team if done on a regular basis.
I'm doing this at a major computer company and my management is supportive. Nonetheless, it took months of discussion and needed to get approved by the VP. And it's probably hurting my "career path".
Culturally, I find people don't understand working less than 100%. You have Friday off? Is that vacation? Is that a partial layoff? (I'm male, and in the US for context.)
Overall, it would be nice if working less than 40 hours were an option for more people.
I get almost as much work done as the other Masters students in my department. In practice, I only work about 50% of a regular workweek but I'd estimate that I get about 80% of the results by being focused during the hours that I am actually there.
It is possible to sustain it, if you are an introvert like me. It's just important not to do the same thing all the time. My degree is focused on low level programming and hardware, and I mainly do AngularJS development for living. So this kind of switch definitely helps.
Other thing which is important, at least personally, is that when you take a break, you must do something that counts. Browsing internet just drains more energy, personally. But I find playing an action packed video game (if you can't bother to go outside - or if you live in North England like I do) quite recharging. [0]
[0] I wrote more about that in my blog http://blog.gedrap.me/blog/2014/02/09/its-all-about-the-shor...
I'm introverted. There is not and has never been any meaningful connection between that and my limits with respect to working hours.
So, 40 hrs at the regular job + x hours working on the startup, where x consumes almost every evening and almost all day on Sat. and Sunday, I'm regularly doing 70+ hour weeks.
Humblebrag? I don't know, and I don't care. I just care about getting this damn thing going and achieving my dreams.
Luckily I enjoy this, because I'm working on something I am actually passionate about. Not that it doesn't get frustrating on occasion, but most of the time it's more pleasure than pain.
So why do all this? Well, as theorique says here:
It isn't about disrupting an industry. It's about money.
That's a little bit of an oversimplification, but there's a lot of truth there. There are things I'd like to do, dreams I'd like to live out, that I can't do at my present level of income. But it's more than that for me (and, I'm guessing, for a lot of other people). I work on building a startup because A. I enjoy the act of building and creating something, and B. as the founder I'm in control and get to call the shots. Here, succeed for fail, it'll be down to my decisions and actions, not some random $BOSS. (Yeah, yeah, go ahead and chime in "everything is luck" crowd. I don't care about you either).
Anyway, when I get tired of working I just imagine myself cruising through New York or London, driving a Ferrari while getting sucked off by a gorgeous readheaded supermodel, and remind myself that there are reasons for doing all this work...
Also, it's bad for you. Bad for your health and bad for your performance.
Having said all of that, there's nothing wrong with 1) pouring yourself into something that's bigger than you, and 2) living a life that's dedicated to something aside from yourself, one which doesn't have traditional work-life boundaries.
That's probably only true in 1% of these cases, but I don't want to lose those folks while giving lectures to the other 99% about values and performance.
ADD: Rephrased, articles like this are also a form of social posturing, and please don't kill the next Thomas Edison with your well-meaning advice to ten thousand corporate drones.
1. That's 60hrs of being a sedentary lazy-ass
2. The more I work outside of work, the less well-rounded I will be
I'm a fit person and take regular walking/stretching breaks and switch between standing and sitting but I still feel like I'm spending way too much time being motionless.
Regarding being well-rounded, I've spent large chunks of my life focused on music, philosophy and learning new (natural) languages. I find that it makes me happier and makes me a more creative programmer, so I tend to feel guilty when realize at the end of the week that I've spent all of my evenings coding and reading RFCs.
"The cult of busy": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1187353
"The busy trap": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4184317
Some weeks 60+ hours can be very productive - but it's important to recognise when you're not being productive and take a proper break - I still find that a challenge.
Question: Do non-software people (I'm thinking Scientists, Mathematicians, etc) ever complain about this?
But when you're working, to say that it takes over your life is a bit of an understatement. The director is typically putting in 18 hours a day for shoots that can last for months. The crew gets 1 day out of 7 off, but not the director (and the crews typically also work long days—overtime is rampant).
It's a frigging marathon to get the footage in the can, and yet, despite nobody really liking that aspect by itself, almost without exception the end result is to want to do it again.
The same is true for almost everything else surrounding the making of a film. Only the actual screenwriting is done on a relatively slow schedule.
Anyway...
Professors tend to put in roughly 40 to 80 hours depending on their scientific and organisational workload, but most others hardly ever work 60 hours/week with an average of 40-ish. But then, nobody really measures how much time they put in, and you have to keep in mind that in science, the ‘passive work’ done sort-of in the background while doing something else plays a larger role than in programming (at least that’s my impression).
That said, 40 hours is not entirely unjustified, given that 8 hours/day is relatively practical if you want to have both breakfast and dinner at home with an 2hours/day commute and that at least most universities are relatively closed-down on weekends (though some enjoy the much more quiet environment…).
Do you have any data on this? Some quick data points that I found :
http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/infbrief/nsf06302/nsf06302.pdf
http://www.stthomas.edu/media/hollorancenter/pdf/Should-We-B...
http://arthropodecology.com/2012/10/25/the-work-life-balance...
A lot of people seem to work more than 40 hours per week. I'm sure some of them do complain. Maybe devs are just more likely to blog about it.
To me, this sounds similar to the question - How much weight can you lift? Almost everyone can increase the amount of weight that they can lift. But physical, genetic reasons will force some upper bound on the progression.
In software engineering, 60+ hours a week on just work stuff is bad...I've noticed a bit of performance degradation at around 50 hours. I do spend a large amount of out of work hours learning more stuff on my own, but mentally it's a different ballgame, which lets you be more relaxed.
In mathematics, your mind is mostly in the relaxed state, unless you're about to take an important exam. For the process of research, you just spend the time you can delving into a particular topic and understanding it.
The life of a mathematician is more analogous to learning & experimemting with different code libraries on the side. The mental balance errs more towards relaxed experimentation as opposed to just getting it done.
But 60h/week for your own startup? Gosh, when I just started out, I loved every single minute of work on my startup, I even didn't want to sleep, I wouldn't get more joy of doing anything else than my startup, because it wasn't work, it was me. I was building my very own future.
I think a 60h week is a completely different story if you compare it to being a salary man and building your own company --> your own life.
With the exception of your own business of course.
I've worked crazy long weeks and its not glamorous and, in my opinion, just straight unhealthy on so many levels.
I think the challenge in working 45+ hours/week is maintaining adequate sleep/diet/exercise/social so that you can remain productive and happy over the long-term. Best of luck.
I don't know why anyone would pride themselves over it.
However, I do find long hours may result out of necessity for the sheer work involved as well. Especially in the earlier days of a company, you compensate for an initial lack of resources and staff by performing multiple roles.
On the business side, you could easily see your mornings taken up by customer calls (especially if you have an international market), the afternoons spent on ad campaigns and marketing content, the late afternoons on general office management. In the evenings when there's less client interaction, I would spend time on product feedback, some data analysis and metrics reporting for the day/week's past. This could easily extend to a 60-80 hour work week, and I would consider fairly typical of early startups.
As you grow there's less need for sure to work so long, as the company grows and responsibilities become more focused. But overall, I think there are circumstances where a 60-80 hr workweeks are necessary, and not necessarily an indication of a problem.
Endless 60 hour weeks are a problem. Perpetual crunch time means that expectations are misaligned with the resources needed to meet them.
The other problem is that somehow people want to make an exception for their startup. Their startup is special. Their startup won't suffer from these problems. As if their startup has found a way to make humans efficient and healthy without sleep. Please. That kind of thinking (I'm staring at a comment right now) is exactly what leads to this kind of mess. Where does the 40 hours a week come from? Years of experience by both workers and their managers and executives.
Why then are executives nowadays so clueless, especially the ones at startups?
When people want their time to be respected, they show how little free time they have. They basically are saying they are dirt-poor in time.
Imagine if people all announced they were dirt-poor in money. And when they met up with their friends, they kept saying, somewhat with pride, how little money they have saved up. In the USA that would seem ludicrous.
Speaking in extremes rarely doesn't do anyone any good. Yeah, this weekend is capping out a 60 hour week for me (and then some), but the problem isn't that this occurred. Its when this becomes the norm. I look at it like peaks and valleys. This week I'm working long. Last week, I did, too. But, this weekend's testing will be testing a prod bug we've been chasing for three weeks. My boss knows, and he's going to trade me some time in the upcoming weeks. Likewise, there have been plenty of weeks that I worked sub-40. As long as work doesn't take over your life unwillingly, things are probably fine. Paraphrasing a TV theme (the source of all wisdom) - you take the good, you take the bad, you take them both and there you have the Facts of Life.
Look at people opinion on HN (i.e. our peers). Being good require to train in new tech and work on personal project outside work time.
If you are pushing yourself to the max for an employer you are most likely not doing that. Meaning in addition of making your boss richer for no personal gain, you make yourself look incompetent to your peers, potentially arming your career.
I probably work 60 to 80 hours a week, most weeks. During slow times I work less. It includes everything from software development to discussing tech support issues with customers, to doing my own billing, to accounting, to any number of other tasks. If I worked less than 60 hours a week I wouldn't have time for real work most weeks.
But a few points:
1. I don't have a commute. When I used to work at Microsoft I would work 40 hours a week, spend at least ten hours a week stuck in traffic, and have at least 5 hours a week in unpaid break time. That adds up to 55 hours by itself. Had I lived a little further away, those could have added up to over 60 hours committed to work for 40 hours of pay. I also find being stuck in traffic significantly more stressful and draining than working.
2. I don't spend more than 40 hours a week doing any specific kind of work. Most weeks, I do less than 20 hours of work software development, and I know that if I am doing particularly heavy software development work, that going above 20 hours a week is courting burnout (I would rather put in 20 hours of really good effort than have to throttle effort in order to stay sane). For lighter work? Sure I could go up to 40.
3. The 60 to 80 hours includes a lot of time that would otherwise be hobby or personal project time, but which I can count because I am self-employed ;-). For example, I spent 20 hours worth of work this week on a strategic project that has no immediate impact regarding revenue, etc, but is fun and I think will make the rest of my work a lot more fun (when I have examples of how I will certainly submit them here on HN). That counts.
4. I work from home so all kinds of break time are usually family time unless I am on HN ;-).
So my point is that there are so many factors that go into this. I think the author is talking about working 60 hours for a business, particularly where you don't work from home, doing just one job. That's fine for short bursts but I wouldn't recommend it as a lifestyle. On the other hand there are certainly contexts where over 60 hours a week for the long run makes sense once you escape the idea that "it's a job."
The intensity of the software development prevents one to work over 8 hours a day, and even not for too long without a break. What I mean is pretty much continuous work, reading news, emails and making calls are not included. This number is usually 5 hours for some standard software companies, which usually have meetings and chatting from time to time during the 8 hours of office work.
Everybody has his own strength during different age range. As startup company, it's really necessary to work 60-80 hours a week including overall work related activities. Just make sure not to burn out yourself.
If you are working 60-80 hours a week, hopefully you aren't just doing one thing. It's one thing to put in 20 hours a week on software development, 20 hours a week on sales and marketing, 20 hours a week on fundraising, and 20 hours a week on business administration. It is far worse to put in 40 hours a week on software development, IMO.
Regarding how to dividing the time slots, my usual practice is to concentrate on one major task and get it done completely in the shortest time period. For example, while I'm doing patent application, I have to complete it with all the available resources being collected and everything in the real-time memory for 2-3 weeks until it can pass the criteria. If it's a software development or fundraising, it may take 3-4 weeks to finish one round of intensive development and reach a milestone. After that period, I'm pretty much exhausted, and have to switch to something else to concentrate on, just like what you said. Focus and hammer down the nails with a deadline in mind is so important. Bug-fixing is a side job, light but time-consuming to cover every possible exceptional cases, but it also depends on whether it needs a redesign.
There are times when quitting is necessary for perspective, and where you can get the same task done quicker by quitting and moving onto something else, and then when you need to, coming back, than you would by pushing for a deadline. Learning to recognize that there are signs of "I don't really understand this problem, so I should come back after I have a chance to digest my failure today" and recognizing when that's a good idea takes some time though.
Most of the time, I have to do extra hours of work to get it completed. Otherwise, it's hard get chance to revisit again unless it's a critical feature or bug.
Another strategy is, just like what you mentioned, once we are stuck at somewhere for more than 4 hours, we have to move to other tasks, give it up temporarily and later on when we come back, maybe things changed or mind changed, it's no longer that hard any more.
For example, a month after I gave up on rewriting the financial logic for LedgerSMB, I got a project that required a small subset of rewritten code there. So I went ahead, took the short cuts required for that, wrote an implementation and such in a half a day, from scratch, when my previous attempt took two weeks with nothing to show from it.
That lead to starting the rewrite again which will begin again in earnest after 1.4 branches off. Instead of budgetting months, I am now budgetting only days.
So, if you're Jonas Salk working on a vaccine for polio, you're quite right to leave everything else in the dust and save people's lives (being highly worthwhile, sacrifices are made to get peak productivity).
If you're working for your ego, or for something ridiculous like letting people share pictures in a new way, or to silence some inner demons, then you may need to be a little more clear-eyed about the costs of your time investment.
In the restaurant industry it is part of the culture that no successful chef rises from the trenches of building a well-regarded establishment working less than 60-70 hours a week. That is the minimum.
I've worked nearly every position in the restaurant biz (I love the industry and would do it everyday if it paid anything decent) including a couple well-regarded NYC places where I worked consecutive 100+ hour weeks for extended periods of time, 24 hour shifts, and often times ended up sleeping somewhere in the restaurant so instead of spending an hour to get home and an hour to come back, I could use 2 extra hours of sleep. When I was 17 I saved a paycheck with 112 hours on it.
At almost 21 now and having recently completely left the industry (except for occasional catering gigs) I was up until recently still working consecutive 70-90 hour weeks.
It's likely because Im young and maybe naive but the appeal for me has always been the camaraderie and for the life of me I cannot find that in a startup. I've interviewed in person with over a dozen startups now in Manhattan and Brooklyn and I've turned down offers from the majority of companies I interviewed with because at 5pm, they all turn off their computers and go home.
I want to work with a team that's put all their chips into the company. Financially, physically, emotionally. I want the blood, sweat, and tears that make up the restaurant industry. Not because I think my hours are "cool" or "impressive" because I know I wont be able to maintain those hours as I get older and have real commitments. For now what I want is a team that has it all on the line. I know the risks are high but I know the reward is higher, the friendships that come out of those experiences have always been the strongest ones for me and the experiences have taught me how to handle the worst.
As I get older I'm sure I'll come to learn the differences between being paid for physical labour and being paid to develop software. Eventually I'll be in the same boat as most of you but for now I'll continue to work a 12 hour day and wakeup excited to check my emails and excited to hack on the next feature for my next side-project.
Staring at a computer all day and writing code is way harder on you than running around the restaurant. There are also stuff like deadlines, bugs, 12 am outages and tons of other issues that always are in the back of your mind.
But then you could argue that everyone else on the team does that, my boss likes it that way blah blah. Again, totally understood that if everyone else is doing it, why wouldn't you but the fact still remains "you can control it to an extent". That's the point.
I have made it a point to set some strict boundaries. Sure, I have the luxury of doing that after being in the industry for a while as a specialist and my clients depend on my expertise. So it is more about value than time. Focus on creating that for your employers/clients and you are golden.
if we switch to 4-weekday in the future, we will then consider 4*8=32 hour per week is typical, and work 40+ hours a week will burn you out? where and how to draw the line?
I agree that there is no point to brag about your 60+ hour work style, but, what really decides the 'normal' work hours each week?
One other very big caveat is this type of a conversation with me when I was 20 would have been tougher because I had much less of a clue of what else was out in the world that I couldn't live without and wanted to have as part of my life. It's also what allows young people to give up their 20's pursing startups that have little to no chance in hell of setting them up to chase their interests for the rest of their life.
It's also why I very much agree with PG's advice to simply solve actual problems as a student, as the closer you are to solving problems, the closer you're to value that can carry you forward into the next thing you work on.
Invariably, many 20-somethings don't know much about the world, or what's in it. The more time spent behind a keyboard the more once can be left behind the eight ball in becoming well rounded enough to interface with the problems that are out in the world that need solving.
Life hasn't been binary for me so far, there's no specific generalization available to follow. Instead of focusing on one thing for 60 hours a week, I've found that paying attention to make sure I'm growing and having experiences that are helping me grow in a meaningful, satisfying, fulfilling, and lasting way was enough to kind of get the hang of.
Getting caught up in the echo chamber of doing what others doing got me what most others got -- not much that I valued for those hours, until I changed it up.
Many laws before the FLSA (like the New York law famously struck down as unconstitutional in the later-reversed Lochner v. New York) capped the workweek at 60 hours.
Imagine if either of these laws were the standard for the country ... maybe that would change our perspective on what is healthy and what is unhealthy.
I like the momentum of those 50 - 60 hour weeks. More importantly, makes it easier for those weeks I want to do a 20 hour or a 0 hours work week.
As an extreme example, I'd wager that most people instinctively admire those who can make it all the way through Navy SEAL bootcamp, and one of the reasons is that participants are literally working NONSTOP during that period, at a level of physical exertion that most people nowadays could not sustain for a few hours, let alone days on end.
I've worked a sustained 60 for a lot of years and done back-to-back 80's. I just don't think I was super productive. My most personally productive run was on a job that I had 4 hours in the morning to program and was doing something completely different in the afternoon.
I totally agree with you. If you super concentrated on solving one hard problem within 4 hours in the morning, it's hard to have the same amount of energy to do another on in the rest of the day. So we need to manage our productivity in a better way to balance the work load and intensity. We need to have time to get recharged.
There is a lot of talk about big data in our industry, but it seems to me that some small data experiments would be useful as well because there is so much that we do with no data to back up the practices.
We should worry more about getting our minds occupied with useless information. How healthy is a strict 40 hour week when 20 more hours are spent browsing the web and another 20 or more watching TV? Do we even still know what else we could do with our time? We might as well do some productive work ...
The productivity studies of Navy military groups on ships is moving them away from 60+ hour weeks to 40 hour work weeks.
They are finding that it hampers alertness/awareness
It is probably the more of the same that makes the quick decline after 40 hours.
Otherwise, barring some disaster (as then I get time in lieu), I'm out of the door once hours are up.
It's not just a money issue - working stupid hours just makes people tired and they make mistakes, and in many jobs, extra hours just stretch things so they are spending lots of time sitting around waiting for other things.
They discovered that going back and forth between 60 and 40 hr weeks did produce a sustained production increase.
The whole X hours per week greatly underestimates surrounding factors. X hours of what? Hard manual labour? Staring at a CCTV screen?
That means emergencies can't be every week.
This isn't true for all people. I've had weeks where I've worked 100+ hours productively because I was working on my own projects and initiatives, for my own company and enrichment, and had hit a stride. But I would never brag about that effort, because the effort itself is meaningless. Only the results of the effort mattered, and of those I am very proud. Too many brag about the effort regardless of what is often a lack of results.
^1 - http://dennisforbes.ca/index.php/2013/03/05/mediocre-manager...
What's even worse is when the executives started to delegate tasks outside of one's job description because they were undermanned. That's where I drew the line, call them out on it, and got canned. What's even more funny was being outcasted where a typical company lunch or gathering would always be about who has done the most hour of work or have become "heros" by saving the project by working beyond the work hours.
At one point the vice president called me at 1 AM (after leaving work at 10 pm) on the commute back home as I walked him through logging into the company backend used to power mobile applications.
It's quite interesting because they got funded 6 million dollars but they couldn't afford to hire more staff and they insisted on breaking even when it clearly was not scaling.
What I realized about the tech market in BC is that a lot of it is huff piece by local media and the continued image of "grass is greener over here" where none of it highlights the exploitative work environment for highly skilled technical engineers in the software/web industry. With the rising real estate prices and people basically living check to check to keep a roof over their heads, I wouldn't be surprised if Vancouver turns to a resort town with people leaving for tech jobs outside of BC to where the cost of living and wages are justified. Already many of the engineers at the company I worked for have left for United States.
I'm not alone with this story there are many many horror stories I hear from other local engineers and designers. In fact the only people I hear that are happy are freelancers charging higher wage.
In my personal observations there are three reasons that people work long hours. Money, self advancement (skill wise or other) and a loyal commitment to finish a large task within a time span.