
Branding workaholism as a desirable lifestyle choice - artur_makly
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/31/opinion/sunday/silicon-valley-work-life-balance-.html
======
kelnos
Anecdotal, obviously, but:

I worked 80 hour weeks (including some time on weekends) for about a year and
half as an early developer at a startup (employee 15) a bunch of years ago.
The startup failed (pity-acquired by an investor a couple years after I left;
common shareholders got nothing). I did learn a lot, and was fortunately paid
very near market-rate, but it was at the expense of my physical and mental
health, and social life during that period. And boy was I burned out by the
end. Fortunately I was single and had no family, and even then it took a huge
toll.

At my current company (been there 6 years, joined as around employee 70), I
tend to work ~45-hour weeks (with occasional very-short-term spikes near a
product launch). The company is successful (IPO last year). I've learned a
lot, but most importantly I'm _happy_. I have a busy social life, time for a
SO, and take 4-6 weeks of vacation a year (as one of the relatively few people
who actually takes full advantage of the unlimited vacation policy). Don't get
me wrong: I work hard. I get a lot done. I just get it done without grinding
myself down into nothing.

In my experience there's a negative correlation between long hours and
success&happiness. Certainly there are people who have found success through
(or perhaps despite?) long hours. And maybe many of them have brainwashed
themselves into believing all that has made them happy, and maybe even some of
them are genuinely happy.

I just don't think it's worth it -- for me. Everyone has a different
definition of success: for some it's making 7 figures and retiring at 30
comfortably. For others it's making 9 figures and retiring lavishly. For
others it's making less, but having a steady, secure job, and having copious
time for hobbies, friends, and family. And everything in between.

I think it's difficult to draw the line. For some people, working themselves
nearly to death is actually what they want to do. I think that's fine, but the
problem becomes when that is (as it somewhat is now) the norm, and people who
don't want to do that, have to do so anyway just to survive in the industry.

~~~
pmoriarty
_" and even then it took a huge toll"_

There's a real lack of awareness of an openness about the toll crazy hours
extract from all too many people, not just in startups but in many larger
companies as well, and the prevalence of them not just in tech but among so
many professions.

A tiny fraction of society can lay back and relax off of a 2% or less interest
on their investments, while so many of the rest are working until they
collapse (physically or mentally), and it's considered business as usual --
and if you can't keep up you are stepped over and forgotten as the rest get on
with getting ahead.

------
Animats
_The guy is developing an app that lets you visualize how a coffee table from
a catalog might look in your living room._

Something Autodesk has offered for years and gives away.[1] Available for IOS,
Android, and browser. This guy is killing himself to build a me-too product.

[1] [https://www.homestyler.com/mobile](https://www.homestyler.com/mobile)

~~~
nxc18
Thanks for sharing this. Its sad, but I see soooo many startups that (somehow)
get funding to:

* Build an idea that already exists, is cheap, and well-executed by another company

* Build something that is so limited in scope that it could be replaced by a competitor (or your OS) basically overnight

~~~
Animats
You could do something interesting in that space.

Autodesk stopped offering HomeStyler. It's now offered by 北京居然设计家家居连锁集团有限公司,
which is www.shejijia.com, a big furniture retailer in China. The software
isn't the hard part. It's the furniture catalog. Such programs are only useful
with a big 3D model catalog, and the party that has the incentive to provide
that is a furniture dealer.

Amazon needs that capability. Develop a good 3D capture program specialized
for furniture and you might have something. Something that guides you through
taking enough images to get the whole object into the model cleanly. Make that
available to Amazon sellers. Or eBay sellers.

~~~
pfranz
Autodesk also used to offer 123D Catch[1]. A free app that used photogrammetry
to give you a 3d object. I'm pretty sure it gave you textures (and UVs).

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autodesk_123D#Additional_appli...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autodesk_123D#Additional_applications)

------
yladiz
If I were to sell my soul to work insane hours (80+ per week) I'd work in
finance instead of software development. The prospects of making it big in
software are pretty slim, even with "hustle", because the important thing is
not due to your work ethic as much as luck, capturing the right market, and
being able to capitalize on it effectively. If you're doing a startup, you
don't often start with much money and won't make good money until you're well
past the point of profitability. Contrasting to finance, where you can
(apparently, I don't know first hand) pull in mid 6 figures easily if you do
your time and get the right clients (and once you get the right clients part
of that high work time is meeting the client anyway). I consider workaholism
just another form of addiction, and at least I'd like to get paid well for
that addiction, and if I had the drive to start a business I'd at least have
the capital to do it then.

Beyond this, as an employee I think it is insane for a company to expect you
to work the same as a co-founder for relatively little. If the culture was to
be working 70 hours per week or essentially always needing to have your phone
with you and be available, then it's the sign of a toxic work culture. I can
kind of understand around "crunch time" even though I think it's a symptom of
bad time management and probably announcing something before you should have.
I can kind of understand a founder putting in that much work, even if I do
think it's unhealthy, but not an employee.

~~~
pmoriarty
_" If the culture was to be working 70 hours per week or essentially always
needing to have your phone with you and be available, then it's the sign of a
toxic work culture."_

Or it could be a sign that you work in ops.

~~~
autotune
Ops here. Never been on-call or had to work more than 40 hours in the previous
5 years of doing this as a career, but then again, I've always been a
consultant in some capacity for multiple clients so YMMV.

------
gaius
A VC doesn't care about your health. If you don't look after yourself, no-one
will.

------
arthurjj
I ended up getting fat and a few health issues working at a unicorn start up.
It took me 18 months to realize how badly I was handling it. Correcting for
that work culture required a decent about of self reflection and
introspection, that was hard to manage while working 60 hours a week.

------
dahdum
From the article: "The truth is that much of the extra effort these
entrepreneurs and their employees are putting in is pointless anyway. Working
beyond 56 hours in a week adds little productivity, according to a 2014 report
by the Stanford economist John Pencavel. "

I don't see how the study, which was done on manufacturing / production
workers, necessarily applies to knowledge workers or entrepreneurs?

My experience working 80-90 hr weeks was that as long as I had flexibility to
vary the tasks I didn't sense any drop in productivity. In many cases the
fewer context switches increased the amount of "flow", and projects went more
quickly than they would have.

~~~
Analemma_
> My experience working 80-90 hr weeks was that as long as I had flexibility
> to vary the tasks I didn't sense any drop in productivity. In many cases the
> fewer context switches increased the amount of "flow", and projects went
> more quickly than they would have.

Did your experience rigorously measure how many mistakes (bugs, if you're a
developer) you made during hours over 56 relative to baseline, and how much it
cost someone else down the road in cleanup and opportunity costs to fix them?

With programmers, at least, they can keep writing code well into 100 hours a
week and beyond, but the trustworthiness of that code falls off, and that's a
problem. It's a well-known result that fixing bugs costs many times more than
not making them to begin with.

~~~
dahdum
I saw no difference in quality of work, nor did I get reports on any. I
believe the key reason is the ability to change tasks. Been writing code for 4
hours and tired of it? Switch to documentation, regression testing, managerial
tasks, ticket triage, spec writing, or something else from your list instead.

Want to go see a movie in the middle of the day, take a nap, or take a two
hour lunch to regroup? No one cares.

For startups especially it's do-or-die, so this type of pressure will never go
away.

Imagine you had two 5-person startups each building a social media management
platform to capitalize on a growing market. The space is quickly becoming
crowded, and while not winner-take-all, most entrants will fail.

Company A: They work 90 hour weeks, weekends included. The willingly give up
their social lives, take no vacations, and work as hard as they can. They'll
sleep at the office if they have to.

Company B: They work 40 hour weeks, and take a normal amount of time off. At
the end of the day they go home and relax with family/friends.

Either company could succeed in the end, but which has the better chance?
Which attracts more VC interest? Who gives a better impression to prospective
clients? Who builds a fully functional platform first?

In my experience Company A often trounces Company B.

------
johncoogan
You don't need to work 24/7\. At most jobs, you just need to seem like you
work 24/7\. Batch up all your emails for the day, then space them out to be
sent at odd hours like 11:30pm and 5:45am using something like Boomerang for
Gmail.[1] Everyone will think you're working constantly.

[1] [http://www.boomeranggmail.com/](http://www.boomeranggmail.com/)

~~~
zzalpha
I work at a company that's extremely supportive of good work life balance. We
offer lots of flexibility on hours, facilitate working from home, and
encourage people to work at a sustainable pace.

That didn't stop one fellow, many years ago, from trying exactly this. He'd
commit code that was simply reindentation/style changes, send emails, etc,
late at night, in an attempt to paper over the fact that he was simply a weak
contributor that produced low quality code.

Everyone saw straight through him and recognized the absurdity for what it
was.

Maintain work-life balance. If the company you work for doesn't support that
choice, work somewhere else. It is an absolute lie that "most jobs" need you
to "seem like you work 24/7", and perpetuating that lie only makes it easier
for the bad actors to justify their behaviour.

~~~
johncoogan
Completely agree. Was joking in my original comment. Obviously having a
healthy lifestyle will lead to increased productivity. Fetishizing workaholism
is dumb and a big part of why Wall Street is struggling to retain talent these
days.

~~~
zzalpha
Honestly, I figured that was the case, but, as my experience demonstrates,
some people might actually take that suggestion seriously!

------
leggomylibro
This sort of attitude is extremely toxic.

Hey, guess what happens when you tell someone you work in programming in a
large (tech) city? They immediately write you out of their life as someone who
is A) boring and B) working 24/7 anyways.

Typecasting sucks.

~~~
marssaxman
That's not been my experience of Seattle at all. One of the reasons I have
stayed here so long is that there's so much cultural overlap between techies,
artists, musicians, burners, etc.

Maybe this is something that has been changing recently - I hear people
griping about "brogrammers" now, though I've never actually met one, so far as
I know. And perhaps Burning Man culture is not the binding force it used to
be, now that the event has gone mainstream.

It did take me at least a year before I really started making any friends
here, but my experience has been that... once you find your way in, you're in.

~~~
leggomylibro
>I hear people griping about "brogrammers" now, though I've never actually met
one, so far as I know.

Yep, that's been 100% my experience. I don't know what a "brogrammer" is, only
that apparently I am one and they are scum. And I've been here for 3 years.
It's been getting worse; two years ago people would at least talk to me for
more than a few minutes at a time. One year ago people would grudgingly give
me a chance, but you could see them clocking out once tech stuff came up.

This year, the resentment is palpable. And I'm so tired of putting in so much
and ... I just can't do this anymore.

~~~
lawnchair_larry
Can you blame them? You took their homes. I would resent anybody who took my
home.

~~~
leggomylibro
Yes, I can. I didn't take shit; I don't own property, and at this rate, their
precious houses are in no danger from me.

So mission accomplished; congratufuckinglations.

And I'll bet you dislike Trump's anti-immigration policies, to boot. So do I,
but unlike people here I put my money where my mouth is.

~~~
lawnchair_larry
I'm not sure why you made it about me.

Every tech worker in Seattle and SF is able to afford the very high rents in
those cities while the local population cannot. They are absolutely being
pushed out by the influx of these people who are raising the pricing floor.

------
sotojuan
Not in SV, but so happy my NYC startup has never asked me work outside of
10-6. Good startups exist!

------
nevatiaritika
Its very disheartening that Silicon Valley would promote such lifestyles. As a
tech worker outside the US, US has always seemed more promising than the rest
of the world when it comes to innovations and myriad number of opportunities
to realize dreams.

So far I had been whining about how we have really bad inherent work cultures
here in Japan. Its a norm for everyone to work overtime : 9am to 10pm is
extremely normal. "Hardworking" guys send emails at 2 am and next day when I
check my inbox, I'm somewhere burdened if my boss would expect the same of me.
Clearly no one here understands that longer hours != more productivity.

If the pioneer locations in the industry were to promote such culture, I
wonder if countries like Japan would ever grow out of its current mindset
validating their methods even more so.

------
9to5guy
I work 9-430 most days and it doesn't seem to be hurting the ole paycheck. I'm
not buying Maseratis but I am financially independent after around a decade in
the valley. Hard work and cleverness and a reasonable helping of luck can get
you paid out here, even with regular hours.

------
filereaper
"The truth is that much of the extra effort these entrepreneurs and their
employees are putting in is pointless anyway. Working beyond 56 hours in a
week adds little productivity, according to a 2014 report by the Stanford
economist John Pencavel. But the point may be less about productivity than
about demonstrating commitment and team spirit."

My main disagreement with this type of quote is how do you account for R&D?
You have to try things out, not all of them work out, you throw things away,
things don't work out as expected. If you're in a true startup, money is
tight, deadlines are agressive, you have to put in the time.

These types of statements discredit the "do or die" moments on which companies
are built on.

~~~
pfranz
You need downtime to have a Eureka[1] moment. I see a lot of wasted time
spinning wheels on the wrong thing.

My wife's job has offices in a bunch of countries. Recently she was talking to
someone they borrowed from Europe for a few weeks. They observed that in the
U.S. they work many more hours, but take coffee breaks and intermingle work
and leisure. They were suggesting they work fewer hours, but are more focused
when at work. It's hard to tell, but I'd say their "output" is comparable
(maybe an edge to the team in Europe).

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eureka_(word)#Archimedes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eureka_\(word\)#Archimedes)

------
jaiprabhu
I have never experienced such extreme attitude to work anywhere personally in
my 10+ years of experience working in SV, across four different employers, I
do, however, hear anecdotes of tough demands at some startups but that does
seem all that pervasive either.

------
Powerofmene
I absolutely work too much. I always have and probably always will. I am the
first to tell people to have a better work/life balance and to go watch their
kids play ball, etc. I enjoy work and always have and thankfully my family
understands. That being said, when I go on vacation, I really want to be on
vacation. I don't answer email, participate in conference calls, etc. I work
hard but when I am off, I am off.

I respect people who say they don't want to work the hours I do, but there are
those who enjoy work and spend lots of hours at work. Just because it is not
for everybody does not mean that there are not those who choose to spend a
great real of time at work.

------
badcede
Rage-porn bunk. As if Vaynerchuk is representative of anything, let alone SV.

------
paloaltokid
Plug: come work for Pivotal. We do 9-6 all day everyday.

~~~
kenjackson
I'm not sure I want to work 9-6 everyday. I still like my weekends.

~~~
paloaltokid
Fair enough, it's only Monday through Friday.

