
Working Ridiculously Long Hours is a Sign that Something is Wrong - USNetizen
http://blog.netizencorp.com/2014/03/30/working-rediculously-long-hours-is-a-sign-that-something-is-wrong/
======
stickhandle
I find the _Work Smarter, Not Harder_ meme a little tiresome. How 'bout this -
Work Smarter _AND_ Harder. Focus on outputs as the only thing to brag about.
Hours put in rarely impresses anyone of significance. Its about the output.
_Work Smarter, Not Harder_ is condescension masked as process advice. The
truth of the matter is you need to put in the time (read: harder) to get good
at just about anything. Only then is _smarter_ an option, but drop the
_harder_ at your peril.

~~~
larrys
"I find the Work Smarter, Not Harder meme a little tiresome"

Agree. Let's take it one step further.

Let's say you want to win the game. And one of the ways you do so is to
convince the other players of the game (and business is a game btw) to not
work as hard. [1]

I see this quite a bit with this meme. People telling other people that they
don't have to work hard.

[1] This is really the reverse of the mindgame that the US military plays with
all those really cool documentaries about US Military force. They do that to
make our capabilities look so totally overwhelming at the risk of disclosing
something that we might not want the enemy to know that we have. The weight
the pros and cons and disclose what they need to to achieve the goal.

~~~
rayiner
Long term sustainable value creation doesn't happen by treating everything as
a game to be won.

~~~
larrys
"Long term sustainable value creation"

What do you mean exactly by "long term sustainable value creation"? Examples?

~~~
rayiner
Bell Labs, NASA moon mission, the development of the internet, Xerox PARC,
Google's self driving car efforts. Possibly Tesla and Space X (I assume their
engineers are well rested).

I'm quite partial to big plodding corporate R&D labs as a model for
technological development. These efforts are marathons, not 100m dashes.

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swampthing
For what it's worth, I don't think working long hours and sleep deprivation
are synonymous, as this blog post assumes. You can easily work 10 hours a day
(70 hours a week), sleep 8 hours a night, and still have 6 hours left over.
Assume 3 hours for meals, hygeine, exercise, you're still left with 3 for
commute and leisure.

As an aside, I don't know if it's true for early-stage startups that
"processes make or break your business". That might be true for large, mature
companies, but it seems prima facie false for early-stage startups.

~~~
sheepmullet
Oops you forgot about learning and development: Add two hours (if you care
about long term productivity and career prospects). Also standard commute is
an hour. So you are left with no free time at all. Not really sustainable.

Unless your office has 20% time or some variation in which case you are only
really working 8 hours anyway.

~~~
swampthing
I don't think most people spend 2 hours a day on "learning and development"
outside of work (you might consider getting a job where you can learn and
develop more, if so). But even if you did, you can take a day off to do that.
You're still at 60 hours of work, which is what the blog post references.

~~~
sheepmullet
I have no idea what most people do. Most of my friends and colleagues spend 2+
hours a day working on side projects and/or learning new technologies.

Unfortunately, in my experience I've found in fast paced environments you
learn the minimum to get the job done.

Sure I could switch companies every 18months in order to keep learning via
work _or_ i could add a ton of business value at my current company by working
a more reasonable number of hours and focusing on my personal development in
my own time.

------
D9u
John Carmack used to put in marathon sessions coding asm for DOOM... As with
many other successful people, sometimes the work just flows and you forget
about things such as time.

Could it be that those failing are failing because their ideas are just not as
great as they had imagined?

~~~
w_t_payne
I too have put in marathon coding sessions ... some of my best work has been
done in such circumstances ... but try as I might, I just cannot turn "flow-
state" on like a tap. Indeed, the more I try to push myself at work, the
harder and harder it seems to be to get into flow-state. I wish I had a
systematic way of encouraging that particular state of consciousness.

~~~
mentos
I find the flow state comes at the beginning of a project when theres a ton of
marginal utility per line of code.

But as a project wears on new code more often than not is to repair broken
aspects and not so much to build the new and exciting features. Constantly
switching gears between different parts of the code base can be hard to
maintain that beloved flow.

------
polskibus
While I agree with other opinions on this article that this is only an ad for
consulting, I think that we should understand that ridic-long-hours is not
scalable.

If you really want to help your company grow, you should not be taking as much
load as possible onto yourself because you will quickly become the bottleneck.
You should care about spreading the load as evenly as possible. On HN many of
us understand the obstacles to software scalability, yet when it comes to
people scalability we tend to ignore those observations.

------
larrys
While I might tend to agree with this based on the less than approx. 2 years
in my life that I worked for someone else, as an entrepreneur where you have
to cover so many bases, and work hard to create opportunity, I don't agree
based on my experience. (Especially if you are bootstrapping.)

I can tie many of the things that I have today to the wide net I cast in
earlier years and the excess hours I put in trying different things until
something stuck (many years later in a few cases). Forget vacations and
weekends. That was for me. You may be different and be able to pull it off
with less hours.

This blanked "smarter not harder" is just that. It's a blanket statement that
could be correct in some cases and not in others. So it is essentially
worthless. Do you know if it applies to you? Sure many years later you will.
Do you want to take that chance? I didn't and I'm glad I didn't.

Otoh when I worked for someone else many years ago I was always amazed at how
people would eat lunch in their cars and schedule really early meetings which
I felt were counterproductive (given the amount you stood to gain in that
particular situation). But even in this case it's a total YMMV.

So my advice is to work hard and work many hours if you are an entrepreneur
and need to try to get a business to work or keep working. If you are doing
something else (programming) that may not be the case. Remember what PG said
about "staying alive". What if he had cut back and hadn't had something to
sell? We wouldn't be reading HN today would we?

One last example. I learned Unix's in the 80's while running my own business
in my spare time which led to being able to do many things on the net in the
90's. Had I not put in those hours (and it was working by the way) I would not
have been able to take advantage of some of the things that I did.

Of course if you can't work hard for some reason (health, family etc.) than
you can't. So there is nothing to discus. And you have to accept that fact.

------
ams6110
Nice ad for business process consulting services.

~~~
larrys
Noting also that this was posted by the consulting services on Sunday on HN.

And written first (which had to take time as well).

Obviously not all of this is going to stick. And the consultant could be quite
successful without going to the trouble of writing a blog post and trying to
get it on HN (or elsewhere). But the extra effort in this case worked (it
seems) and it is drawing attention no doubt to the consulting services which I
had never heard of before.

Since it got the required attention it probably shows a bit that the effort
and extra work payed off.

And if the OP worked every single weekend doing the same thing (here and
elsewhere) that extra work could land "the big client". This, from my
experience, is the way things like this work.

~~~
USNetizen
In all honesty, none of this was my intention. I had no idea things would be
this popular. I'm glad it is, don't get me wrong, but I sort of stumbled into
this.

It wasn't planned or put up with the intent to advertise. The whole post took
no more than about 30 minutes to write, I just happen to have strong feelings
and a lot of experience on the subject which made it easy to put together.

~~~
larrys
Understood.

But likewise you should also realize that working long hours or "all the time"
to some people is not really always work. I've had people do a "tisk tisk" he
is working and I say "I like what I am doing so don't feel bad for me". I'm
sure I'm not the only person who is like this either. For one person traveling
on business might be something they hate and another something that they get
great joy from.

Anyway they might not be really suffering that much. [1] (I speak from my own
point of view and assume that others may feel the same way.)

[1] Also they could be escaping something else that is much less desirable
perhaps. "Help me clean the house" as one example!

------
muteh
This article is nonsensical. Using a study that says that 24 hours without
sleep is bad to say that only getting 7 hours of sleep is bad? Please... The
Jeff Archibald post that's linked to is actually good. Yes, all these amazing
people did work really long hours, but (for the most part) they didn't brag
about it, and you can bet that they were looking very carefully at how they
spent their time.

------
stretchwithme
Sometimes it is and sometimes it isn't. We are less creative when we don't get
enough sleep and focus too long on a problem.

How often we get into a state of flow is probably a better predictor of how
productive our time is, not whether we spend six or twelve hours at it.

------
pepon
Yeah, go and tell Elon Musk or Steve Jobs to raise SpaceX, Tesla, Apple and so
on with this "4 hour week"...

~~~
robryan
I wonder if there is a difference between the CEO type role and a programmer.

It is possible in the case of a CEO that you would be able to spend more total
time. Sure your performance would still suffer but it could be that just being
able to get through every meeting that you want to have could be enough.

Programming is a bit different in that the work you are doing when tired could
well end up having to be rewritten down the track.

------
stelios
This brings to mind a comment by Elon Musk:
[http://youtu.be/4Fl9LRgG3_A?t=1m35s](http://youtu.be/4Fl9LRgG3_A?t=1m35s)

~~~
aswanson
That's a stupid statement by Musk. It's akin to saying, if I start off a
marathon at 3x the speed that the other runners start it at, Im going to be 3x
the distance they are, so I will win the race. There are ridiculous nth order
negative effects from working 100+ hours a week: health, personal
relationships, intelligence. Fuck, you could crash into a telephone pole
driving home after a 17-hour session of work. I've almost done it myself. That
was a dumb comment by Elon, if read unqualified.

~~~
stelios
Sure, I agree this is not a sustainable practice for most people. I think to
go through this and come out sane, "work" must have a different meaning than
it does for most people. For the likes of Musk, working seems to be equivalent
to being in a mission to change the world. When operating under this mindset,
you work not just because what you're doing might lead you to a better
socioeconomic situation, but because that is the most interesting & important
thing you could possibly be doing, ever. Then "working" (for a lack of a
better term) 100+ hours a week is nothing but having the most fun you could
possibly have. It's the sense of purpose here that I think plays a major role
in turning work into something that can subjectively be more meaningful than
the things you mentioned.

------
michaelochurch
Here's a strange thought. We tend to assume that people working the most hours
are the most dedicated to the project. That's sometimes true, but is it always
valid? Maybe most of the people who seem to be working the longest hours are
the ones planning for it to fail.

When people are engaged and things are going well, people get a lot done.
Sometimes, that involves longer-than-usual hours and sometimes it doesn't. But
for the purpose of honesty, it's worth staging that long hours _are_ sometimes
a sign of something good-- a lot of opportunity.

However, it can mean the opposite. When a team or project or company is in
trouble and it looks like failure is imminent, people ramp up the hours, not
because they think it will prevent failure, but because they don't want to be
blamed, sacrificed, demoted or fired when things go wrong enough for the
knives to come out. When things go to shit, the people thrown overboard first
are the ones who seem to be suffering the least.

When someone's working a lot because he's engaged and loves the work, that's
not a bad sign. When people are visibly competing on hours, that means (to me)
that they expect the project to fail. It looks like the opposite, but it's
actually a vote of no confidence. As often as it means anything else, a person
putting in long hours means, "I'm shoring up my image for the inevitable
political fight, because shit's about to get nasty".

There's more to that picture. The best people, when they see what's happening,
tend to disengage a bit and start thinking about other opportunities. Working
60+ hour weeks when the "prize" is an inferior version of the job they
formerly had, that just doesn't appeal to them. They'd rather get away, and
while they're putting themselves at some higher-than-normal risk of getting
canned, by _not_ competing on hours, they already have exit strategies in
place. The ones who stick around tend to be, more often than not, the mediocre
and political people.

