
"Any time you have worked long hours, it is a sign of a broken process." - zzzeek
http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/101988/should-developers-accept-overtime-weekend-work-denied-bonus-payments/101989#101989
======
edw519
What do long hours often represent?

Enterprise: Incompetent management, lazy co-workers, and spoiled users.

Small Business: Tough competition and limited resources.

Startup: Taking advantage of opportunites that may not pass this way again.

~~~
swombat
That's very succinct, witty, and more or less diametrically opposed to the
point of the OP on StackOverflow. Did you read it? :-)

He's making the point that regular long hours are _always_ a sign of bad
management.

I'd tend to agree. Any business can be run in balance with a reasonable
lifestyle. If you're working overtime very often on your own business, it's
either because you're incompetent, or lazy, or greedy, or failing (see
'incompetent'). If you're working regular long hours on someone else's
business, it's because they are incompetent/lazy/greedy.

~~~
webwright
"If you're working overtime very often on your own business, it's either
because you're incompetent, or lazy, or greedy, or failing (see
'incompetent')."

Of all of the successful people I've met (measured in cash, influence, etc), I
can't think of ANY who weren't pretty seriously married to their work. I guess
many of those people fall into the "greedy" camp and are doing it for the
money. But I think most of them do it because they love (or are just addicted
to) the game they are playing.

Whoever you're competing with, you've probably got competitors smarter than
you and willing to put in long hours. If you're playing to win (many people
do, for a lot of reasons), how do you propose to beat them?

To anticipate a common argument: Yes, working hard can lead to stress/bad
decisions/burnout. But empirically, it seems to correlate pretty strongly with
success.

~~~
swombat
I think that's a myth of the startup world (a persistent, but mostly incorrect
myth). I know successful people with both balanced and unbalanced lives... and
the former are definitely happier.

I'm not convinced that regular long hours lead to a more competitive business.
Particularly when it comes to running a business (as opposed to being a
contractor or freelancer, which is a completely different proposition),
spending 1 hour sitting outside and having a great idea that saves you a day
of work is much more valuable than spending 16 hours getting it done the
stupid way.

Generally, I haven't seen a great correlation between working long hours and
working smart - but I have seen a good correlation between working smart and
being successful.

Another anecdotal bit of evidence: generally, most of the successful
workaholics I've met tend to be in the corporate world, where they often don't
have the choice of working smart.

~~~
webwright
That's a bit of a straw man. You don't have to choose between working harder
or smarter. And I never said anything about happiness.

Say we fork the universe now and one version of you works 25 hour weeks
henceforth, which the other works 50 hours per week henceforth. Who retires
with more money and more impact on the world? Both version of you are equally
smart. The well-rested you might make SLIGHTLY smarter decisions due to
happiness/lack of fatigue perhaps... But surely you wouldn't contend that the
success outcomes (professional impact and wealth, for the sake of argument)
wouldn't be different.

It's not a myth-- working hard correlates with success (plenty of studies out
there to back it up). Working smart correlates with success too... Though one
of the things that really surprised me about being in Y Combinator was that
the founders WEREN'T universally brilliant/clever. They DID universally work
their asses off and generally had irrational stick-with-it-ness.

Happiness is a whole different discussion, of course. Whether "top 1%" success
is even worth it is another discussion.

~~~
nostrademons
It's my understanding that when people say "working hard" in these
discussions, they aren't comparing 25 hrs/week vs. 50 hrs/week. They're
usually comparing 50 hrs/week vs. 75 hrs/week.

If I forked my life into a version of me that worked 50 hour work weeks and
one that worked 75 hour work weeks, the 50-hour me would win, hands down. The
75 hour work week me would outright _miss_ most of the key strategic decisions
that got me where I am. When I look at everything I've done that in hindsight
has been a huge career boost - getting involved in the Harry Potter fandom,
making friends on the C2 Wiki that got me a job in financial software,
learning Lisp & functional programming, founding a startup, and getting a job
at Google - they _all_ happened in the downtime between work. Had I simply
worked 75 hour work weeks since 2001, I would be a physics grad student right
now, hating it, and making a pittance. I'd probably be a damned good physics
grad student, but that doesn't help me very much.

Now, I _also_ put in quite a few hours into developing skills and building a
track record, and I don't think those opportunities would've opened up if I
hadn't. But I wouldn't have thought to look for the opportunities if I did
nothing but concentrate on work. You're a big fan of necessary but not
sufficient conditions, right? The work is necessary, but so is the downtime.

~~~
marvin
And you're STILL assuming that the 75-hour work week you would not get a
severe case of burnout and turn into a 0-hour work week you for a year, after
which going back to the regular schedule would simply not feel like an option.

Even if you didn't assume that, there is still an underlying assumption that
working harder and getting more more money will in the long run make you
happier than working shorter hours and having less.

~~~
wisty
I guess it depends on how much you are making. For 300k, I'll work 75 hours a
week and not burn out. The incentive is there.

If you con me into working 75 hours a week for 70k, I'll burn out when I
realize I've been wasting my time propping up a loser.

I'd imagine most people are the same. Pay them enough, and they will cope with
terrible conditions. Con them, and they will lose interest a lot faster.

~~~
watchandwait
You can still burn out at 300k. Actually, you might be more likely to burn out
with a higher salary, because you will find it easier to rationalize abusing
yourself by cutting sleep, healthy food, friends, etc.

------
akeefer
One thing my company has done since way back in its startup days (we're pretty
successful at this point) is put an emphasis on working reasonable hours, and
it's been successful for us. Some people still choose to work long hours
because they're excited about what they're working on, but it's not expected
or asked of anyone. There were two reasons for doing that even as a startup,
and I think they're both still valid.

Reason #1 is that working long hours often becomes an excuse to not prioritize
properly. Working under realistic constraints forces you to really decide
whether some feature is worth it, or if spending 40 hours on Feature A is
better than spending 40 hours in Features B, C, and D combined. Too often the
answer at companies is, "Well, A, B, C, and D are all really important, so
just work harder and do everything." That's a very seductive trap to fall
into, but it's absolutely the wrong escape valve. At least in my view a
failure to focus and prioritize properly is far more often a cause of failure
for startups than "we didn't work hard enough."

Reason #2 is that you want to avoid burning people out if you expect to be
around for the long haul. Our company just turned 10, and we still have a
surprising number of long-tenured engineers, which I'd attribute in large part
to the work environment and the relative sanity of the work/life balance
people can have. If you expect people to work 60+ hours a week every week,
they're not going to stick around for 10 years; they're going to get burned
out and bored and they'll feel like the only way to get a break is to quit.

You can quibble with the second reason, but I think that even in a situation
where you feel like you have to get a ton done and working 40 hours a week
isn't an option, it's very important not to use "we'll just work harder" as an
excuse to avoid making the hard decisions around priorities.

------
Androsynth
My biggest problem with long hours (aside from the long hours themselves), is
that like most programmers, I'm not constantly productive for 10 hours a day.
It frustrates me that I have to sit in my desk for long periods where I'm
unproductive before my muse hits and then I enter hugely productive periods
(which often take place outside of normal business hours).

I don't think some m-f, 9-5 union type situation is the proper answer, but
theres gotta be a better way. Sitting at my desk when I'm not being productive
is a waste of my life.

~~~
jrockway
Work somewhere else? It's 3pm and I'm just now ready to head in to the office.

~~~
felipemnoa
Used to do this all the time at my old job. There were so many distractions
during the day that I would just come in late and code all by myself. It was
awesome.

------
mburney
I'm curious how efficient most coders are even in an 8 hour work day. I find
that I can only log about 4 - 5 hours a day (on average) of solid coding time
(or marketing/business work). This is because I limit myself to an 8 hour work
day, but of course there are breaks and inevitable down time.

~~~
orlick
Our startup team of 10 has kept pretty strict time logs for the past 3 years.
We have an official policy of 40 hour work weeks, but yeah, no developers are
able to have that much productive time. Usually we see about 25-30 hours of
solid development time, 5 hours of meeting/admin time, and 5 hours of
lunches/coffee/break time.

~~~
djb_hackernews
I'd like to hear more about the choice to keep strict time logs in a startup
environment. Especially strict ones that provide enough granularity to see 5
hours of break time/wk.

~~~
quizbiz
Me too. (Another case where seeing up votes would be useful)

------
rdouble
Long hours are not always because of a broken process, or death march
deadlines.

Many times when I have worked long hours, it was because I was really into the
problem I was trying to solve, and didn't want to quit.

~~~
billswift
Same here. Any time you are working a difficult problem, especially one that
is difficult because of its complexity, you have to keep a lot of context in
your head. In that situation, keep going as long as you can and are still
making progress. This is the same problem, but in a more extreme context, as
the "getting back on track" problem caused by interruptions that was discussed
in _Peopleware_ , and frequently since.

~~~
brunnsbe
There was a discussion program on radio here in Finland (Eftersnack on YLE
Vega) where they talked about heavy jobs and one job, along the other works
job that contained physical challenge, was the job as a software engineer.
They compared it to playing chess all day long; "the next move is yours and
you cannot get it out of your head, you think about the move (read problem in
your code/application) all day and night long". Although they went a little
bit over the top with the comparison they still hit the nail.

------
gte910h
Routine long hours are sign of a broken process.

Rare spats of long hours due to abnormal events is not an issue

~~~
liljimmytables
Or even due to awesome coding. I would hate to miss out on my occasional bouts
of can't-drag-me-away-from-the-keyboard inspiration simply because someone
"fixed" my work ethic and shut the office at 5pm.

But yeah, I appreciate the sentiment that no-one should be allowed to pillage
their workers' evenings and weekends simply because they don't want to tell
their boss "I promised something I couldn't deliver."

~~~
gte910h
Courage is underrated in the tech industry.

------
dave_sullivan
I know a lot of people who seem to like working long hours. It allows them to
think they're getting more done, but I suspect that many of the processes
involved could be optimized if they thought about it a bit. For me, I work
long hours but it's spread out over the course of a day (so removing breaks/bs
it's probably not much more than 40 hours p/wk), and I love what I do, so I do
get a lot done (and it feels less like work than other jobs I've had).

For other jobs, like being a big firm lawyer, long hours are kind of baked in:
You get paid a salary (a big one), the company you work for bills you out by
the hour, person with the highest billables doesn't get fired. That's probably
not likely to change, it's not a process problem per se, and I suspect there's
plenty other jobs generally like that.

~~~
T-hawk
I've known at least a few guys who did indeed like working long hours in the
office, since that was less stressful than going home to a house full of
cranky kids at bedtime. One co-worker even relished his 1.5 hour commute as
the only relaxing parts of his day.

I often like to hang around the office to take care of personal business-but-
not-work stuff between 6 and 7 pm. Things like personal finance, doing
accounting for this one volunteer organization (I'm treasurer), browsing and
booking personal travel. I never want to do that stuff once I'm at home, so
putting that into the 6-7 pm window both lowers temptation to do it during the
business workday and pushes out an urge to keep working on work stuff late.

~~~
mellery451
I would call that selfish (avoiding the kids at home, that is). Sure, there
are plenty of days I'd probably just rather hole-up in my cube and code late
into night, but I don't because it's more important that I be an engaged
parent. It's not like my kids are going to get a do-over on childhood.

------
trustfundbaby
Any time you have worked long hours it is a sign of a broken process.

\--------------------------

I see the point they're trying to make, but this is the problem with speaking
in absolutes ...

My personal preference (and I suspect other developers do this too, but I
could be very wrong about that) is to work when I'm in the zone ... sometimes
I can go for 8 hours, others I can go 24 hours straight without any trouble
(other times I don't get anything done for a couple of days) ... during
projects when I'm knee deep in building something, its not uncommon for me to
do 10 - 14 hour days ... not because its expected of me, but because that's
how I work.

As long your employer isn't forcing you to do death marches/ insisting you
work on weekends and you're getting good rest, exercise and eating well, I
don't see a problem.

------
AlexC04
Honestly I think the real answer is "if you're asking that question, it's time
to find a new job"

I've been through this very same ringer recently and strongly believe that
changing from within is far more trouble, far more stressful and far more
difficult than the effort is worth.

If you've got so many options, leave.

I've very happy in my new role and it took getting out of the old one to fix
it.

------
jgilliam
Ah, so _this_ is why it takes LinkedIn forever to add new features.

~~~
mentat
No, that is why it takes a long time to add <random obscure feature that
doesn't have business value>.

------
sliverstorm
How about in a cyclical project start -> project release process?

I am not referring to "crunch time" where you realize everything is broken and
your schedule was unrealistic; rather, many projects I have participated in
have an escalating work load as you near release, because a lot of the work
simply cannot be done before previous stages are completed.

Unless you are a large entity that can heavily "pipeline" by running 10 or 20
projects at once, and shuffle people around as a project's workload changes,
to avoid ever working overtime you'd need to either have to hire too many
employees, or hire/fire regularly. Not entirely dissimilar to trying to
balance a server cluster with load spikes.

~~~
danielharan
Work that can't be done because of dependencies, long release cycles instead
of incremental delivery, planned escalating work load...

What part of that do you think is NOT broken?

~~~
sliverstorm
It may not be the romantic ideal, but I don't see the fix. Try as you might,
some work has dependency trees.

About all I can think of is over-hiring, or release cycles could be extended,
but for us TTM is pretty sensitive.

------
rokhayakebe
To start with working 40 hours in itself is probably too much. I do not have
studies to back this up, but I think after 5 working hours it is best you stop
for the day.

~~~
ptman
I have this vague recollection of reading a study that claimed people in
research and development should be working around 25 hours per week for best
productivity. And I've never been able to find that study after that =( I
think it was German. I keep wondering if I dreamed about it...

------
bitops
A lot of nice feel good answers on this post. But for some of us, too freaking
bad if you have to work long hours.

I'm not personally a fan of long hours, but not everyone can work for a
LinkedIn. And in many shops, long hours are unavoidable regardless of how much
well-intentioned process is in place.

~~~
peteretep
I realize it's rarely this simple, but get a new job if you care. The labour
market is a market, and unless you leave, citing whichever of manager
incompetence or lack of money is the problem, it won't get fixed because /it
doesn't need to be fixed/.

------
terhechte
If I'd count all the over hours that I did for my current company over the
years, I think it would be the equivalent of one year of work. And yes, most
of that wasn't necessary but bad planning and a fraked up process.

------
ChuckMcM
The punch line is that this is how LinkedIn grew, however I know for a fact
that the operations guys put in some odd hours :-)

That being said, its symptomatic. I've been places where the hours were modest
and lots got done, and places where the hours were insane and nothing got
done.

So the title (and the point the OP makes) don't really hold up. Perhaps it
would be more accurate to say that if you can't get done what you need to get
done during nominal work hourse, then one possibility is that your process is
broken. Of course that isn't as impactful :-)

------
jhdavids8
One of the worst articles I've ever seen posted on HN. I'm not going to even
read through the comments, but I hope most are simply stating that this is
complete BS. Otherwise, you're arguing simply for the sake of arguing. Not
everything should be argued, not everything should be over-analyzed. Working
long hours is often a choice; you do it to get ahead, you do it to improve
your product, you do it for any number of reasons (and yes, maybe you do it
because something is broken). Any argument to the contrary supporting this
stupid argument is simply BS.

------
rick888
I've seen this at companies where the boss or manager either doesn't
understand the development process or just wants to make money and doesn't
care. So you have situations where a feature should take 2 weeks to implement,
but they want it in a week (so you need to work extra hours to make up for
it).

This is one of the reasons I hate working for other people. If I'm going to be
wasting my youth away for something, I'm going to be getting all or the
majority of the profits.

------
warmfuzzykitten
Process schmoces. Any time I work long hours it's a sign I want to work long
hours. Sometimes you're hot and you just don't want to stop.

~~~
Androsynth
I'm like this also, but would you be hot for 60 hours a week for a year? I
think the op is referring to extending time periods.

------
Duff
The amusing thing to me is that the question was closed as offtopic.
Stackexchange is slowly turning into a Usenet/Wikipedia hybrid.

~~~
chrisbennet
Um, that's what is _supposed_ to be. It is not a chat room. It's a place to
get answers (or give them).

"All questions on Stack Exchange are expected to be objective and have
concrete answers; we’re not a place for conversation, opinions, or
socializing. We also expect questions to represent real problems, not just
imponderables, hypotheticals, or requests for opinions."

~~~
robryan
I think they miss out on an opportunity there, just tag them differently or
put them in a different section or something. The question and answer stuff is
great for searching but when you have put together such a knowledgeable
community it seems like a waste not to allow them to engage on topics like
this.

------
d0m
"Any time you have worked long hours it is a sign of a broken process." Or
extreme pleasure hacking something.

------
FrancescoRizzi
Indeed: "Late nights are a sign of scope failure. Hero mode is a sign of scope
failure." (J. Fried of 37signals, from
[http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2185-a-new-way-of-working-
a-t...](http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2185-a-new-way-of-working-a-two-month-
recap) )

------
KeyBoardG
Just because LinkedIn was a success does not mean a blanket statement can be
made for all. I would have titled it "All too often". Too many outside factors
can have an impact. I would use Wordpress for the example of working long
hours and also being a success.

------
jowiar
The broken process may not be company-specific. We are in an industry that is
driven not just by getting things to market, but by getting things to market
faster than the other guy. As we all know, software does not really scale too
well to adding people to the problem. Thus, being to market faster is often
achieved by coaxing more work out of the same number of people, this results
in long hours.

Thought experiment: Imagine some sort of truce declared among startups to skip
this part of the arms race. Or, imagine a law passed capping work weeks for
software engineers at 50 hours, no exceptions (again, the reason this
happening by law would be to eliminate the arms race). What would it do?

~~~
barnaby
That's a good thought experiment. I imagine we would very suddenly see an
explosion of automation solutions for making engineers accomplish more with
less time. We would also see an almost perfect eradication of most time-sinks
in software development.

------
jhdavids8
"This one time, at one job I had, I was able to work 9-5 Monday-Friday. The
company I worked for was successful. Therefore, ANY job that requires extra
hours is the sign of a broken process."

Why would anyone hire a dude like this with such poor reasoning skills?

------
patternpaul
I am surprised no one has quoted something from Steve Blank
[http://steveblank.com/2009/06/18/epitaph-for-an-
entrepreneur...](http://steveblank.com/2009/06/18/epitaph-for-an-
entrepreneur/) "Work Smarter Not Harder As I got older I began to realize that
how effective you are is not necessarily correlated with how many hours you
work. My ideas about Customer Development started evolving around these
concepts. Eric Ries’s astute observations about engineering and Lean Startups
make the same point. I began to think how to be effective and strategic rather
than just present and tactical."

------
gxs
I don't know - and I absolutely loathe statements like these.

Sometimes, I prefer to work 18 hours in one day and enjoy 2 days free, rather
than 9 to 5 it for 3-4 days. At this point, you're insulting my personal
preferences, not my process.

------
malkia
This broken process ships a lot of games :(

~~~
MartinCron
It ships a lot of derivative and buggy games while chewing up game developers
like consumables.

~~~
malkia
But still makes money, and that seems to matter most for certain people.

~~~
mannicken
You certainly don't want to work for those people.

~~~
malkia
I'm okay with what I get.

------
thomasgerbe
"Any time you have worked long hours, it is a sign of a broken process."

I hate absolute statements like these. Some of my best works have come from
working long hours voluntarily.

------
felipemnoa
<rant> What a bunch of B.S. In fact I cannot believe it is even here in Hacker
News.

"Any time you have worked long hours, it is a sign of a broken process."

This is a such a horrible generalization. Successful people always work
hard/long hours to make something succeed. Imagine telling your kids that to
be successful you should work just 40 hours and no more. They will be easily
steamed rolled by other kids that are willing to work harder/ go the extra
mile.

Here is a relevant piece from: <http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html>

>>Now for the matter of drive. You observe that most great scientists have
tremendous drive. I worked for ten years with John Tukey at Bell Labs. He had
tremendous drive. One day about three or four years after I joined, I
discovered that John Tukey was slightly younger than I was. John was a genius
and I clearly was not. Well I went storming into Bode's office and said, ``How
can anybody my age know as much as John Tukey does?'' He leaned back in his
chair, put his hands behind his head, grinned slightly, and said, ``You would
be surprised Hamming, how much you would know if you worked as hard as he did
that many years.'' I simply slunk out of the office!<<

>>What Bode was saying was this: ``Knowledge and productivity are like
compound interest.'' Given two people of approximately the same ability and
one person who works ten percent more than the other, the latter will more
than twice outproduce the former. The more you know, the more you learn; the
more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the
opportunity - it is very much like compound interest. I don't want to give you
a rate, but it is a very high rate. Given two people with exactly the same
ability, the one person who manages day in and day out to get in one more hour
of thinking will be tremendously more productive over a lifetime. I took
Bode's remark to heart; I spent a good deal more of my time for some years
trying to work a bit harder and I found, in fact, I could get more work done.
I don't like to say it in front of my wife, but I did sort of neglect her
sometimes; I needed to study. You have to neglect things if you intend to get
what you want done. There's no question about this.<<

Yes, sometimes it may mean that working long hours there is something wrong
and the title should reflect that rather than just generalizing.

I remember there was a study done at one point that the best piano players had
worked longer hours per week practicing as opposed to the so so piano player.

You want to work 40 hours and be happy? Good! But I doubt you will be able to
achieve greatness like that. Achieving success requires sacrifices.

Edison is another example of a guy that would work really long hours. Look at
everything that he accomplished. You want to be mediocre, work 40 hours. You
want to be great like Edison, work your ass off. Don't listen to the little
people that tell you not to work your ass off. That is the road to mediocrity.

Now, if you are saying that you want to have time for family and be another
cog in the machine, 40 hours are great for you. </rant>

edit - OK, after further reflection I think that what the title means is that
IF you are just a cog in the machine of a large corporation AND you are
working long hours then something is terribly wrong. If that was the original
intent then I completely agree. Is OK to do it once in a while but if it is
normal then something is terribly wrong.

Now, for academics, athletics, other competitive fields and even startups at
least in their earlier faces you still have to work long hours or the other
guys will steam roll you. Eventually though you do hit a point of diminishing
returns so you have to watch for that.

~~~
rjd
So you take a few edge cases and make them the example for the main stream?

I doubt you should ever use Edison or Einstein to ever refer to the average
person. Let alone put yourself in the same camp, you'll probably do yourself
mental harm via exhaustion. Fine if you have abnormal drive and intelligence
go for it.

But chances are you are an average person and need to obey the rules of what
makes average people happy. Or you won't be happy. Maybe you'll throw yourself
at your work in the hope of finding happiness.. something I'll admit to doing
myself.. chasing dreams of a better life.

Theres plenty of research that states the exact opposite of what you are
saying, enough that France even had laws banning working over 35 hours (and
its 48 hours for the rest of Europe).
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time#Western_Europe>

What works for some people doesn't work for others. I remember listening to my
friend talk about working in Japan during the late 80's early 90's and
described the people he worked with as having an ingrained apathy towards the
long work day, and most just mucked around all day. Took 2 hours to even start
work, the work force was extremely unproductive for the hours they where
doing. I'm sure theres different stories in different industries but thats a
story I take as 100% as the person isn't known for being a liar or
exaggerator.

Just because you can make people work long hours doesn't mean things get
better, it often means things get worse. And thats the moral of his story
about Japan.

The stories of how industrious and loyal they are... just stories... they are
just people like everyone else. And as a majority they'd rather be at home
with there families and friends than at work making someone else rich.

~~~
felipemnoa
>>So you take a few edge cases and make them the example for the main stream?

I could show you many more but why?

>>But chances are you are an average person and need to obey the rules of what
makes average people happy

Yes, do what makes you happy and yes I am an average person but that doesn't
mean that I cannot tell you that the sky is blue even if I were blind (I think
you know what I mean). What I disliked is the blanket statement. In very
competitive fields if you want to be top dog you have to work long hours and
even that may not be enough. Of course, if you work on a sweatshop working
long hours really makes no difference. Top dog against who? Lets just not make
blanket statements.

Some people are happy working 40 hours others are happy working 80 hours. And
if you are in a competitive field 40 hours will not do the job. Happiness is
besides the point. If that doesn't make you happy don't do it. I'm not telling
anybody to work 80 hours to be happy. I'm telling you not to try to convince
other people that they should not work 80 hours a week because you don't like
to work 80 hours a week.

I'm saying that if you want to stay ahead of your peers, say, athletics,
academics, you better train more, study harder than the other guy. Is almost a
self evident truth so I don't understand what we are arguing about. If I'm
wrong please enlighten me.

~~~
kamaal
Very correct,

But as a matter for fact we need to define the term 'Happiness', a lot of
people measure happiness by how much minimum they can achieve(Which makes them
happy) with how much minimum effort they put. For example, if you put in 5
productive hours of work a day and end up achieving a, what you describe as a
happy life, you would consider that success.

But a lot of people tend to measure success in a different way. For example,
Even though during atleast two days in a week I might have opportunity to go
back early. I purposefully use the free time to check if I can do some extra
work which will give an edge to my career. Generally its something like this,
I check if I can add some feature that has a direct impact on revenue or some
bug that I can fix or something I can read upon which will help me take more
informed decisions later.

I was not a very brilliant kid in the school, nor in college nor during my
engineering. In fact I was almost on border, but I would always make it. How?
By multiplying effort over time. Most of my friends back in school when I meet
them today, find it astonishing that I have made it so big in the industry,
while even many high scoring folks haven't.

At work my philosophy is very simple, Seize every work opportunity as it
comes. Ensure you multiply effort with time. Thereby, completely hedging for
my low IQ by sheer work alone. Indeed as they say opportunity multiplies as
you seize it. I also see a lot of high scoring people straight out of college
who don't do it big in the industry. Because intelligent people expect,
brilliance will make up for everything. But the fact is, Intelligence only
acts as a catalyst in the path to success. The bulk of everything else is
sheer hard work.

Apart from this its important to understand things like management. Especially
time management. Its important to plan, review and track your life time,
decade, yearly , monthly and weekly goals. Measuring your productivity is
important. Reviewing it constantly, and course correction is the key.

The great thing is today you can achieve anything by sheer work. This gives me
great hope for the future.

~~~
rjd
We're mixing things here a bit. Theres always merit in pushing and improving
yourself, but the article was about putting in extra hours for other people,
and the linked response was about over time being linked to bad process and
decisions.

And hence in a sense chasing someone else's dream and not so much your own,
and even worse putter a wager on the return of that extra effort.

------
phatbyte
I'm lucky, I can't remember doing overnight or weekends, but for the first
time we will have to do, but I'll get paid 50% of my salary for two extra
working weekends.

It really confuses to see kids with red bulls typing code all day and night. I
mean, how can you think clear and be productive that way ?

You may do more, but do you do it better and deliver quality code ?

~~~
benaston
>> It really confuses to see kids with red bulls typing code all day and night

Those kids are learning and will probably make a success of what they are
doing. The payoff comes later.

------
biznickman
So says employee #178 .... I'm being sarcastic, but I doubt employee #1 @
LinkedIn would tell you they worked 9-5

------
DavidSJ
Or it's a sign that you love your job.

------
ctdonath
One comment mentioned "Fizz-Buzz" which I hadn't heard of. Interesting tidbit.
[http://imranontech.com/2007/01/24/using-fizzbuzz-to-find-
dev...](http://imranontech.com/2007/01/24/using-fizzbuzz-to-find-developers-
who-grok-coding/)

~~~
hugh3
That confused me. Am I overlooking something that makes the problem non-
trivial?

On further reading I'm pretty sure I'm _not_ , but perhaps the very triviality
of the problem confuses people enough that they have difficulty with it. ("Is
there some weird edge case I'm not considering?")

The other big question with FizzBuzz is whether it's worth making your code
more complicated in order to make it slightly shorter. That is, do you start
off with a "if i % 15 == 0" or not? My inclination is _yes_ , because I'd
rather have ten lines that obviously work than eight lines that might not.

~~~
three14
I interviewed someone, and following a hunch, asked him to write FizzBuzz, and
he couldn't do it within a half hour. He wasn't overthinking it; he just
couldn't decompose the problem.

------
mcculley
Certainly, if you work on an assembly line. If you work in some industry where
you have to come up with solutions to problems, the workload may be more lumpy
because nobody has figured out how to build a production line for it yet.

------
forgotAgain
Goldratt saw this 30 years ago. No one has done a better job explaining why
this is true.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliyahu_M._Goldratt>

------
hm2k
Maybe you're working long hours to fix the process?

That's the only reason I work long hours.

------
known
Not applicable if you're _debugging_ code

------
Hisoka
It's nice that LinkedIn has a great process: regression testing and the like,
but what if you work in an environment where you can't afford to test every
single little thing, and where business models, let alone requirements change
constantly (ie. a startup)? What if a competitor just launched a feature that
will put you out of business if you don't implement the same thing in 48
hours? What if there is a mission-critical bug that has to be fixed by the end
of the day or else all your customers will bail out?

Secondly, most who work in Wall Street will tell you it's not about the
process. It's about the culture. People don't work until 7 or 8 because
they're fixing bugs, or because development is so slow. It's because they're
expected to and if they get up and leave at 5, it leaves a bad impression on
management and their co-workers.

~~~
rokhayakebe
_What if a competitor just launched a feature that will put you out of
business if you don't implement the same thing in 48 hours?_

Even if we stretched the 48 hours to 48 days, I am pretty sure this has never
happened.

~~~
mattmanser
Facebook suddenly rushing out stuff as Google+ launches.

Reddit having to work crazy to take up the exodus from Digg.

That bookmark service that did great out of the del.ici.ous fiasco (sorry I
honestly can't remember your name!).

Perpetuum having a mass of new players because of the Eve monocle incident.

I'm sure others can think of times when one business has had to react rapidly
to either manoeuvres or failures of another business.

Not quite put out of business, but massive opportunity cost if the reaction is
not made.

~~~
robryan
_That bookmark service that did great out of the del.ici.ous fiasco (sorry I
honestly can't remember your name!)._

trunk.ly? They certainly weren't the only ones but were in the right place at
the right time to attract a heap of users and as a consequence did some crazy
weeks to bring forward a heap of planned features to keep the newly attracted
users.

------
lwat
One of our most successful clients (grew from nothing to 200+ employees in 5
years) has always had a very strict 6pm closing time. Everyone must be out of
the building at 6pm and there's no 'working from home' or 'work on the
weekend' allowed.

~~~
robryan
I'm sure this cut people off in the zone when 6pm hit from time to time. As
others have said here I think that the best is a happy medium, no enforced
long hours but no enforced breaks either.

