Comment by Jemaclus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Jemaclus | Hacker News Reader

Back when I first got into the start-up scene, I used to work long hours because everyone else did. At some point, I realized that literally nothing has to be done RIGHT NOW OH MY GOD RIGHT NOW. Almost everything can wait until tomorrow morning. Sure, there are some high-priority bugs that are breaking the site that need to be fixed ASAP, but during normal operating procedures, once that clock hits 5pm, I should start wrapping up my work so that I can pick it up fresh in the morning.

I don't take my work home with me, I don't check my work email when I'm at home. It's just not worth the stress to me.

I love my job, I love my work, I feel like I'm contributing to making the world a better place -- it's just not 100% of who I am. I have a dog, a girlfriend, a handful of close friends, a few engaging hobbies, and a ton of books to read and miles to run. I'm more than my job, and once I can pay the bills, the rest of the money is just a nice to have -- but not nice enough to give up my health and sanity.

Then again, I'm extremely lucky to be in this situation, and a lot of people aren't. Some of my coworkers work long hours still, but they seem happy about it. As long as that's true,... well, whatever floats your boat, right?

That's why I love the start up I work at. We work 9-6 M-F. No weekends. No long nights.

I feel like places that have a "show up at 10 and work till its late" are immature and fooling themselves thinking they have gains in productivity.

Properly managing your time is a skill and one that management should help you develop. I shouldn't feel pressured to stay late because everyone else was fooling around all day. It also sets clear expectations of how hard and long you should work. There's no "Oh if I don't stay till 9 tonight will my manager think I'm not working hard?" Everyone is on the same page.

Before I started working there I was one of the people that would stay up all night sometimes to finish something. come in groggy the next day and get nothing done for that day. When in reality if I spent 8.5 hours the first day working on it and 8.5 hours the second day, I would have had full mental clarity when working on the project and the added bonus of mental and physical well-being.

I can't disagree more. Working 9 AM to 6 PM in San Francisco now will mean you get sunshine two hours from 7 to 9 (and that's assuming you get ready for work/play instantly). All the lovely daylight hours are wasted indoors.

Lunch? Work outside? Take breaks?

Wait, what? So what do you propose? Work until 3 pm?

I like 10-7.

Working in Sweden i get no sunsine hours no matter what schedule i follow.

Its not about what time you start and finish its about how long you work. Having an open ended working schedule is what is wrong with the work culture at most startups in silicon valley.

Not everyone feels like they're wasting their life because they're indoors when it's sunny.

Totally agree. Setting aside some specific time periods for a big push, having a regular and sustainable cadence is invaluable. Especially if you have big audacious goals that require you to be clever. It is terribly hard for people to have that "aha" moment without sustained cadence. Hardly anyone is clever when habitually sleep deprived

I'm not sure if it's due to increased self-awareness, or whether it's physically due to aging, but I know for a fact that pushing over 50 hours a week will quickly lead to lower overall productivity for me. I love what I do and I used to work insane startup-level hours, but on reflection a lot of those hours are less efficient, whether due to decreased efficiency or downright procrastination when I'm too tired to deal with a difficult problem.

To some extent I think tech startup culture evolved this way not just because it takes a superhuman effort to build a successful company, but also because learning to be a good programmer is something that is extremely difficult if you're not at least a little obsessed with it. My tendency to work 80 hours a week at my startup is the natural evolution of my 14-year-old self wanting to spend all my time working on the computer.

But now that I have a couple decades experience under my belt, I can sit down and focus for 8 hours that will lead to far more productivity than slogging through 16 hours. Furthermore, my subconscious is able to continue working on problems during my downtime, so stepping away, getting some exercise, cooking some healthy food, sleeping 9 hours all feed back to greater overall productivity.

Ok, I have to ask.

Geniune question here. How the fuck do you people do this? I hear stuff like this a lot, especially in the software community. Do you guys actually log 80 hours a week of doing stuff? How on earth do you "start loosing productivity" at 50 hours a week? I start loosing productivity around 40 if not before.

BTW, totally not asking this to be a dick, and I really respect your work ethic and your choices for how to live. I just don't understand how people can live in that reality. Most of Europe says 40 hours of work a week is too much, and frankly I'm completely on board.

I lose serious productivity at 30hrs. But I manage to fill in the corners with mindless tasks like answering emails. I think 80 hours a week is only achievable with the help of drugs i.e. caffeine

Speaking of silicon valley, it seems like it's often:

* Caffeine in public, or for starters, and then adderall or something more potent,

* Alcohol after work to wind down,

* Maybe oxycodone or heroin.

If it seems like your problems can be solved by working more hours, then you end up medicating yourself into oblivion, blowing up, or burning out.

I am also baffled by the idea of working 80 hours in a week.

Well, its not just peeps in SV that use the caffeine + alcohol recipe for productivity, its pretty much all of America. Speaking anecdotally, I find that Caffeine makes me super alert and alcohol super relaxed, both of which are the intended effects. But I do make a point to not abuse either of them, simply because I don't want my senses to get numbed by their effect.

what's the difference between daily use of coffee/alcohol and abuse?

One beer a day is not abuse? I drink 1 beer at workdays and probably 10+ in the weekend usually in one night. Needless to say, the day after having those I do not drink any beer at all and suffer from a hangover... Which in turn sometimes sort of is enjoyable because it makes you stop thinking for a day.

A doctor would probably classify this as some level of abuse, since medically accepted drinking levels are low (few drinks a week, I think?). Even if its just "1 per day", chemical dependency in order to function is usually seen as an issue. Sure, small doses of coffee & alcohol are well... small, but there are tons of people out there who rely on neither at all, where as the absence of these "small" doses would greatly impact your life. EDIT: I should mention though that I am not really against small-dose self-medication, as the alternative of getting medicated through the "proper system" is probably even more frightening. I do wish I could kick all small-dose habits though, rather than dealing with relapses (boring work without coffee is haaaard) & other compensatory habits.

As for your 10+ beers followed by welcome hangover comment, I believe Adorno addresses this in Minima Moralia and some of his other texts. His basic belief is that people are so alienated from themselves that they treat the weekend (their only time to really be themselves completely) as a respite that will ready them for the onslaught of the next week's work. Basically, the work week and attitudes that have arisen to rationalize it are a system of total self-alienation, with all traces of your "in an ideal world" personality smothered out of you.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minima_Moralia

Anyway, sorry if this came off sounding very dramatic. I really am not like deeply worried about you, hah, I'm just saying from a theoretical standpoint what you're describing does not prove your point at all. It's more like you're just using black humor to perpetuate bread&circus mentality.

Not to discredit what you're saying, but I've heard two drinks a day for men, and no more than 4(?) in a single day is not considered abuse.

http://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-living/nutrition-and-healt...

Daily use of such substances is abuse, pure and simple. If you can't function without your morning coffee, then your body has adjusted to the presence of caffeine and you are abusing the substance. Doesn't matter if everyone does it or not, medically speaking.

Personally I don't drink coffee unless I'm interviewing someone at a coffee shop (even then I sometimes order hot chocolate), and only drink socially. Does that mean I work less than some adderall-infused college kid? Maybe. But quality of life and stability should also be valid concerns.

> But I manage to fill in the corners with mindless tasks like answering emails. I think 80 hours a week is only achievable with the help of drugs i.e. caffeine

I work 60+ hours a week at my startup and 20+ hours on various side projects.

I also am completely anti-stimulants (include caffeine). If you truly believe in what you're doing (in my case, engineering the future of culture to retain intellectual thought while simultaneously building my financial independence), it's trivial to work long hours through adrenaline alone.

Well, I guess if your life is your work you have to choice but do it 24 hours a day. I got to experience that at grad time, it's not even stressful. In fact, it may be quite funny.

The bad side is that if your work fails for some reason (as work often does), your entire life failed.

Do you have a family?

No, I'm young.

How is your health?

My health is fine. Since I don't have a family or many friends, I'm still able to get plenty of sleep despite working a lot.

You just power through. I worked as a management consultant a while back and we had record hours for accounting purposes although i was on a salary. One week i worked 106 hrs. That included 20 hours on the weekend and one day where i clocked 20 hours.

Needless to say i don't work there anymore.

Were you actually productive the entire time?

Hell no.

I can hit 50 hr in a week and be pretty productive. After that i'm running at 50% efficiency and rapidly dropping after that. Once over 80 hr it's a struggle to get the most menial tasks done.

I can go 55-60 hours/week at a pretty good clip, but the fall-off after that is drastic, and I can only keep it up for a few months before everything starts to get sad and depressy.

50 hours/week is probably a sweet spot for me.

It depends on how varied your stuff is.

I can easily log 30 hours of paid coding a week, tack on 10-ish hours of email, add some 5+ hours of marketing, and add 10 hours of working out with 10 hours of learning new stuff. I call all of this productive hours and will gladly say an average week contains 70 to 80 productive hours.

But you'll notice that I never spend more than 30 hours a week on any one type of productivity. And that only some 30 odd hours a week are directly billable.

I'd say watch out for the "One brain" fallacy/cognitive bias in all of these responses.

There are lots of factors (age, discipline, interest in what you're doing, etc) but I think a lot of people overlook that one big component of this is brain chemistry. Some athletes are endurance athletes, some athletes are sprinters. It seems obvious that you wouldn't expect Usain Bolt to run the fastest marathon just because he's a runner.

Our brains are just as genetically varied as other physical characteristics. For me, I know that my peak productivity is from 11 pm - 4 am and it goes down exponentially if I have to do non-fun tasks or if I'm in a stressful crunch as opposed to a positive crunch. I also know that after 3-4 months of 10-12 hours, I need to go back down to 5-6 hours until I get excited again. And for some strange reason, if I don't feel something is required, I can leisurely work on something for 12-16 hours a day indefinitely (researching, reading conference papers, learning). If I have to debug code nasty bugs like multithreaded data races, I can't be productive at those lengths of time so I try to mix fun work with this type of dreaded work.

Know what works for you and build your work schedule around that. That's how we work at our startup.

> Sure, there are some high-priority bugs that are breaking the site that need to be fixed ASAP

This is why after making "deploy" a one-click operation, "roll back to the last deployed version" should also be a one-click operation.

Fixing things "ASAP" in a panic doesn't work at all well. First get to a known good state and then do a calm assessment of the right fix, taking as much or as little time as you need (and no need to work late).

I know that this doesn't work for all failures - If a server's drive fails, you still need a plan for how to repair - but it does for many common things.

This is also why having rules about when you can release new features or big changes is very valuable. Or at the very least training your team to stop and think about the timing before pressing the deploy button.

There are rarely cases when a new feature needs released Fri at 4pm or days before a holiday break.

Our general rule is no big deploys on Fridays. Minor bug fixes, maybe, but most of the time it can just wait til Monday!

Yep! Agreed! Usually the bugs I'm talking about are things we didn't catch until well after deployment where a hotfix makes more sense than rolling back. But you're right, if something goes wrong soon after deployment, we roll back immediately!

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