

Challenging The Math of a Work Week - atspcohn
http://v1again.wordpress.com/2012/04/25/challenging-the-math-of-a-work-week/#respond

======
struppi
This is complete bullshit. The original article is absolutely right: We work
in an industry were more hours do not necessarily mean more results - and less
hours do not always mean less results. Of course you can try to win by putting
in more hours than everybody else, but this is a race to the bottom: There
will always be somebody who will work even longer hours, even if it kills them
in the long run. Or you could try to win by outsmarting others. For example,
the 50% more time you have by working insane hours (like the OP suggests) was
easily wasted because of politics and burocratic stuff in some companies I
worked for as a freelancer.

~~~
atspcohn
your comments are over the top. We are talking about a 54 hour work week. Not
100 hours.

~~~
adestefan
54 hours a week is still over 10 hours per day of a standard 5 day work week.

------
njs12345
> 'But the reality is talented people are able to sustain a high level of
> productivity at long hours.'

This, in my opinion, is the flaw in the argument. I don't think it's true for
writing code, unless what you're writing is boilerplate which requires no
mental effort.

> Some of the best engineers in the world work insane hours at Google, Apple
> and facebook and put out great products.

Google doesn't have fixed working hours: <http://www.quora.com/Does-Google-
have-fixed-working-hours>

From what I've heard, you're expected to get things done but no one cares how
you do it. Some people work crazy hours; that's fine for them. Some people
probably work 10-4 and then a little bit in the evening. Matt Welsh seems to
work 9-5: [http://matt-welsh.blogspot.co.uk/2010/12/day-in-life-of-
goog...](http://matt-welsh.blogspot.co.uk/2010/12/day-in-life-of-googler.html)

~~~
atspcohn
I am the writer of the post and I completely support flexible work hours.
Personally, I work 8:15 - 6 pm. I then go home and see my children before bed
time and eat dinner with my wife. I also spend great time on the weekends with
them. What I don’t do is sit in front of a TV very much being a couch potato.
So my work time comes out of my personal time. Not my time with my kids.

~~~
njs12345
Sounds like you make your time work for you. So do I, I've had plenty of days
where the clock hits 4 and I feel mentally drained and know I'm not going to
get much done, and I go home. I don't work well in the morning either, so I
often come in at 10. I do work very well in the evening (10-11pm) so sometimes
I'll a bit of work then, if something comes to mind.

Nobody's ever complained about the amount of work I get done. The problem I
have with this article is that it assumes the more hours you work the more you
get done, when it's just not that simple.

Obviously this is personal experience. What I'm trying to say is that
everybody's different --- the Treehouse guys are working a 4 day week with $3m
a year in revenues. You can't just say 'well, if they worked a 5 day week
that'd be an extra 25% more work for them' any more than you can say 'an extra
25% more work will lead to an extra 25% more in revenues for them'.

~~~
atspcohn
you are referencing flexible work hours, which is very different then what I
am discussing. I couldn't care less when my developers work. if they want to
leave at 4 pm and work late in the evenings, all good.

------
weavejester
Nonsense.

The author confuses correlation with causation (employees at Google work long
hours, Google makes good products, therefore long hours are needed to produce
good products).

He also confuses anecdotal and empirical evidence (employees at Google work
long hours, therefore this is the norm for successful companies). Anecdotal
evidence is notoriously misleading; that's why control groups and large sample
sizes are so important in science.

The author also doesn't account for factors other than productivity. Even
assuming a company with a 5 day work week is more productive on average, it
doesn't matter if the 4-day companies are more successful at attracting good
programmers. A good programmer working for 4 days is going to be productive
than an average programmer working for 5 days (and there _is_ empirical
evidence for this).

Employee turnover isn't touched either, or motivation, which are two huge
things to deal with for any company that employs highly-skilled people.

Finally, the majority of development work is spent not bashing away at a
keyboard, but instead spent thinking about problems. If you're interested in
maximising the productivity of skilled developers, you want to give them
environments that encourage creative thought. Keeping them in an office for 5
days a week doesn't seem like something that would encourage this.

~~~
atspcohn
i never said hard work = great products. Just that you can't work 50% less
than your competitors and have sustained success. I also never advocated
sitting at a desk and banging on a computer. Nor did i dispute giving people a
creative environment. You are reading things into the post that aren't there.

~~~
weavejester
Do you have any empirical evidence to back up your theory, or is it all
supposition?

If it's the latter, and I assume it is, why do you present your hypothesis as
if it's already fact?

Second, why do you assume that 50% less work is such a big deal? Even assuming
you're right, productivity depends on many other factors that influence the
result, and I'd claim by a heck of a lot more than 50%.

The theory I personally subscribe to is that the single most important factor
for any software company is getting the right people. There is some empirical
evidence[1] to support this hypothesis. If I'm correct, then what a company
should care about is attracting and retaining talent.

So even if you assume people can work long hours without burning out, and that
there's no productivity loss in doing so (and I'm pretty sure I've seen
evidence to suggest otherwise), the numbers aren't on your side if your
competition has all the talent because they offer a better work-week.

And even if your team is more productive, it doesn't help you if your
competition builds a simpler, but more commercially successful product,
because they're smarter. Just because something is harder to build doesn't
automatically mean it's more profitable.

[1]:
[http://forums.construx.com/blogs/stevemcc/archive/2011/01/09...](http://forums.construx.com/blogs/stevemcc/archive/2011/01/09/origins-
of-10x-how-valid-is-the-underlying-research.aspx)

~~~
atspcohn
I never pass on my thoughts as fact. The title of that section is "What I
believe." Not "This is a fact." All of the other statements you make are false
choices. You can have a hard working team that also produces simple, clean,
intuitive UX. Great companies do this all of the time.

~~~
weavejester
You do say "Here is what I believe" but before you get to that section you
throw out statements like "Giving up an extra 13 sprints/year to a competitor
is simply unsustainable."

If you meant your whole article to be taken as mere opinion, then it wasn't
clear at all. It looked like you were making a series of statements that were
supposed to be taken as fact, and that only the last section was your opinion
on these facts.

As for my statements being false choice, I did not claim that it is impossible
to have talented people working long hours, just that people are generally
inclined to go for the better offer, and a 4-day week is a very good offer for
someone who's pulling in six figures. If you subscribe to the theory that
getting talented people is several orders of magnitude more effective than
making them work long hours, then a 4-day week makes serious economic sense.

~~~
atspcohn
I think the recruiting benefit that Ryan states is a very, very strong point
in his approach.

------
npsimons
_But the reality is talented people are able to sustain a high level of
productivity at long hours . . . They work 70-80 hour weeks. And they sustain
that level indefinitely._

Studies have shown otherwise; why does he think businesses went to 40 hour
weeks in the first place? Concern for their employees? Don't make me laugh.

Maybe there are exceptions to this rule, and maybe all these Uber-hard working
smart people congregate at startups. Of course, there's also always been the
adage of "work smarter, not harder", and the longer you work (past a certain
amount), no matter how good you are, the less clearly you will be thinking (in
other words, you will not be working smarter).

This is also the argument that PG puts forward in different ways (eg,
<http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html> and
<http://www.paulgraham.com/icad.html>). Basically, if you can produce the same
product, of the same quality, in less time, then you don't need to work more
hours than your competition, and they will never be able to beat you if the
productivity factor is high enough. Ergo, less hours, with better tools and
people, will beat more hours.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
_Studies have shown otherwise; why does he think businesses went to 40 hour
weeks in the first place? Concern for their employees? Don't make me laugh._

Mostly because of union pressure, actually.

------
lazy8
I work 7 days a week very consistently at my startup, but I don't put in many
hours in a given day. I'm too embarrassed to say exactly how many hours. I
take breaks when I feel tired or frustrated, and if a problem comes up in the
afternoon that I don't know how to solve, I quit for the day. Usually I will
be able to solve it in the morning.

I worry sometimes about whether I am working hard enough, so recently I
started doing some time tracking to see where I am spending my time. I looked
around for software and decided on the Web application toggl.com. All you do
is write down what you are doing, and the software logs the time. Really
though you could do the same thing with a spreadsheet or a piece of paper.

It's harder than it sounds to be honest about what you are doing, and why you
are doing it. I have spent a bunch of time on Hacker News this morning reading
posts and writing this. Is that productive, or is it just infotainment? It's
hard to say. I wonder if the author of that article counted the time spend
writing the post and responding to people as a part of work hours. Why or why
not?

I haven't been doing time tracking very long, but I have found that sometimes
there is this period of time at the beginning of doing something where I
haven't really gotten into the task yet, and I feel like "Oh man I'm
_working!_ This is a drag." That feeling peaks maybe after 20 minutes or so. I
find that if I'm able to keep working, I start feeling better, and then after
an hour or so I feel fine, like "This is what I'm doing. It's comfortable. I
could do more."

So I think that maybe sometimes I quit too early, and I could actually be
doing more without feeling stressed or overwhelmed. But I think there are
limits to how much you can push, and you have to be really gentle with
yourself. Because if you force yourself too much, you get burned out and then
it becomes very difficult to even get started on work. You can go days or
weeks at a time getting almost nothing done.

I'm also studying a foreign language at the moment, and I think it is really
important to study every day. Over on the language forum I visit, lots of
people talk about how many flash card reps they do, and it's almost always
more than what I do. What I do seems insignificant, both in terms of reviews
and new cards per day. I feel it is another example of how I don't work hard
enough, and I don't have enough discipline.

But I think the only real way to fail at foreign language study is to quit, so
I hope that keeping my standards for serious study low and spending more time
on fun stuff like reading comics and watching TV shows in the language, I will
be able to stick with it. I haven't missed a day in over 6 months, but it's
going to take years to get to fluency. It's a long process.

I hope working at a startup is similar. I hope it's just a matter of making
progress every day, and not giving up. I hope it's not a competition over who
can work the most hours. If it is, I'm afraid I will probably lose.

------
umtrey
Success comes in many flavors. The author's version of personal success is way
more angled towards professional and business success, where I may put more
emphasis on an amazing relationship with my children as a bigger factor of
personal success. You can be successful by many measures, and have a growing,
profitable, healthy business, without 70-80 hours a week. Are you not
successful because it doesn't hit 1B in revenues?

These kind of articles frustrate me, as someone who already has a tendency to
work too much at the expense of all other aspects of my life. Everyone has
tradeoffs to make. The business tradeoff that Treehouse makes means that
people have a higher likelihood of personal success in ventures outside of
work, at what Mr. Carson sees is a minimal impact to the likelihood of
business/professional success.

Can a company of people working 70-80 hour weeks be more successful than
Treehouse's model? Sure. But I'd argue they're just as likely to be less
successful. More code doesn't always mean more success, whatever the measure
may be.

~~~
atspcohn
I don't work 70-80 hours per week and never advocated it. I leave the office
at 6 pm. i see my kids, eat dinner with my wife and then put in a few hours
rather than sit on the couch watching sitcoms.

------
shaggy
There is a fundamental flaw in the argument that v1again is making/supporting.
The problem with this argument and the math that's always used to support it,
is that it comes from the view point of simply making money. If it were as
simple as (number_of_hours_worked * number_of_people = awesome_product) then a
company would always be able to throw money at a problem and fix it.

In the real world this is so obviously not the case that it's laughable that
anyone makes the argument in the first place. If you're starting a company and
you knew that in order to succeed all you had to do was work more hours than
the other guy, of course you'd do it.

If your goals in business are to make money, then working crazy hours and
ignoring everything else in your life probably makes sense. If you want to
build a long lasting, sustainable business full of happy, productive employees
who make great stuff then you probably want to make sure the work life balance
is as good as it can be.

~~~
atspcohn
i don't disagree with this comment at all. Just that that is a decision that
should have been made before taking VC money. I don't think this is a model
for a VC backed company. It is a model for someone who wants to run a
lifestyle business.

------
cognivore
It's okay, they'll eventually figure it out, when they're sitting on a pile of
money but nothing else to show for those endless years of 70-80 hour work
weeks. Maybe they'll be plenty happy with their pile of money - more power to
them. Or maybe they'll be lonely and have wasted much of their life. That's a
tough dice roll to take.

~~~
atspcohn
this isn't about money. And i am not lonely at all. I have a very healthy
social life. we are talking about a few extra hours per day, which i do at
night after kids have gone to bed. you're way over stating the impact.

------
ryanio
As a student about to enter the work force, I'm personally having an internal
struggle with which lifestyle to choose to pursue. There is the go-big-or-go-
home obsessive startup world work mentality, versus another side of the online
world which I feel Hacker News glosses over without much recognition: building
lifestyle passive income businesses online. There are countless amounts of
people easily making 6 digits online, so it can't be an argument that people
need to work this hard to earn a living. It's rather silly how easy it is to
make money online with a simple product.

So if money isn't the problem, then why do people work their asses off until
they break down or burn out? Is it just a social norm that people have to keep
getting bigger, growing, hiring more, and raising more money?

~~~
struppi
Just my opinion, but you should basically do what you like. I like developing
software, so working for ~40 hours a week is OK for me. But I also try not to
spend too many hours (per year) working for clients so I have time for my own
stuff and also for hobbies (cooking, photography, sports, ...).

I also know that I am less productive when I am tired or overworked, so this
is another reasons why I try to limit my time in front of the computer. For
example, when it's possible, I simply take breaks when I am tired
(<http://davidtanzer.net/node/114> \- though this is often not possible when
working for a client on-site).

I could make more money by doing the same work I do now for more hours - but
that would just be a brute force solution. What I currently try is doing work
that has better hourly rates. I'll also try to build some passive income -
that's what you mentioned.

------
adestefan
_I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real,
actual, work._

~~~
njs12345
The obligatory Office Space reference. You'd hope things would never be that
bad at a startup!

~~~
eli_gottlieb
Actually, it would be _great_ to have a company so efficient that you could
pay a large staff a middle-class salary for 15 minutes per person-week of
actual work. The ultimate vacation policy!

Now I've got to repress my urge to write a socialist parody of _Office Space_.

------
darklajid
Do I provide more value in more time?

If I work in a factory, doing trivial manufacturing tasks where you control
the speed of the lane/conveyor thingy: Probably.

When you explain me what you want without having a clear picture and while
omitting juicy details along the way, totally relying on my ability to think
for you and 'figuring it out'? No. Not at all.

Bottom line: That blog post is not applicable to me and uses a kind of math
that Germans call 'Milchmaedchenrechnung' [1] (Google Translate might help,
basically it's a naive and wrong way to do math). No challenge in sight.

1: <https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milchm%C3%A4dchenrechnung>

------
CookWithMe
> I love my two sons more than anything in the world. I would jump in front of
> moving train to save my children. There is nothing more valuable to me than
> my children. And while I selfishly love spending time with them, I also
> believe that a big part of my responsibility as a father is to train them
> how to succeed in business. That is the reason that I blog.

So you have wasted X hours of your precious working time to write this blog
instead of advancing your company? [Maybe the working time is not so precious
then?] Or did you waste X hours of your personal freetime that you could have
spend with your children, teaching them this lesson in person?

I'd like to see the math that justifies this blog.

~~~
atspcohn
blogging is a very productive use of time for a founder.

------
MauerJ
> "And then one day, a competitor comes out of nowhere, and has your same
> features, for less cost and a few new features that are awesome. And now you
> are playing catch up. But you will never catch up."

> "It just feels so good to type that. A self-fulfilling prophesy that feels
> so good. "

Who uses this self-fulfilling prophesy -- Treehouse to justify 4 day work
weeks or OP to justify hard-work trumping a different view? Both can use the
same argument.

> "And so here is my best advice to my sons…Be the first guy in the gym and
> the last to leave!"

...but are you on the field playing the game?

Good article, thank-you for the perspective.

------
CookWithMe
And what about Company C that puts in 80 hours? And Company D that puts in 100
hours?

The math adds up, at least up to the point when it hits 168 hours ;)

This is really the wrong model. There is a sweet spot of hours vs.
productivity somewhere, it's probably different for everyone. I guess for me
it is even changing on a daily basis. Some weeks I can work through the night
or on the weekend, othertimes I can't seem to get stuff done and be exhausted
on a wednesday...

~~~
atspcohn
80 hours/wk or 100 hours/wk are extreme hours that i wouldn't or didn't
advocate.

