

Sleep deprivation is not a badge of honor - naish
http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1006-sleep-deprivation-is-not-a-badge-of-honor

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Prrometheus
In my years as an investment banker, most of the sleep deprivation that I was
subjected to was the result of poor planning (mostly by other people) and a
hyper-macho, superficial culture. Now as I'm trying to rebuild my health and
psyche, I realize that maybe 20% of it was necessary to accomplish some
important project. The rest could have been skipped without harming the
financial results of the company, though my reputation would have suffered and
I might have been fired long before I quit.

David, if your advocacy leads to even slightly more humane workplaces, you
will deserve to be hailed as a saint by millions of people.

~~~
aswanson
What goes on (that you are allow to share) in those places that requires so
much time and energy? I can see building things taking a lot of effort, but is
it just for theater that people put in so many hours in those places?

~~~
Prrometheus
In investment banking, you usually work on a small team of 3-6 people. The
work day is very different depending on whether your team is currently working
on a deal or is between deals and pitching clients.

If your team is on a deal, then there could be honest-to-goodness work keeping
your team busy for 100 hours a week. Tasks include preparing the materials
used to market your client to potential investors (including financial models,
presentations, and dense official offering documents), managing and attending
meetings with investors or the Board, running down data requests, and diverse
other things.

Most of the bullshit work comes in when a team is between deals. During this
period, the senior members spend a lot of time working their connections at
potential clients while the junior members prepare "pitches" - presentations
designed to convince a company to do a deal. Junior employees are expected to
be at the office when their superiors arrive and stay at the office when their
superiors leave. When I was working, I might start a typical day by finishing
up a request from the day before, then have absolutely nothing to do for 4 or
5 hours, and then receive and turn around assignments from sometime in the
afternoon until the evening. The boss would make his last calls around 7PM,
which is when I would get my last batch of work for the day. I would work on
that for anywhere between one to thirteen hours and then head home (or not, if
it was 13 hours).

The culture at an investment bank is very unforgiving. An employee must be a
competent worker to survive, but he must also be sure to keep up appearances.
Half of an employee's pay is paid in an annual bonus, which is determined by a
mixture of objective and subjective factors. It is not enough to be a good
worker, an employee must also make sure he looks like a good worker - which
entails being seen in the office a lot. The time of a junior employee is not
considered valuable, since they are well overpaid compared to their peers
their bosses feel like they should be willing to take unlimited shit without
bitching. Managing Directors think nothing of asking an Analyst to do
something on Sunday when it pops into their minds, even if the work could
easily wait until Monday morning. An MD will also have no qualms about asking
an Analyst to start on something at 7PM when he could have told him about it
hours earlier. You have never seen so many bitter 23 year-olds as you can find
at an I-Banking office.

In exchange for most of your life, an entry-level employee is usually
compensated well for someone just out of college. I'd estimate the mean
analyst on the street earns $120K in an average year. I wasn't on the street,
but I'm not working right now thanks to my savings from my days as an
I-Banker. If I could do it again, I probably wouldn't. I like where I am but
those were a bleak, desolate 2 years and the angina hasn't completely faded
away yet.

~~~
aswanson
Wow. Thanks for the insight. From the outside, I thought the I-bank business
was the zenith. Looks a lot like my vision of hell, given that info.

~~~
Prrometheus
It is what it is. It is cool to work with hard-nosed, business-minded, sharp
people. I enjoyed sitting in on meetings between Private Equity funds and the
executives of the companies we were trying to raise money for. I learned the
function of all the players in the financial market and I got to stay in nice
New York hotels on someone else's dime. I made good money. But it wasn't for
me, so it was slowly wearing away my health and sanity.

------
pg
Doing a startup seems to me more like playing soccer than running a marathon.
Though you need to pace yourself, there are moments when you want to work
super hard. So while being out of breath is not a sufficient condition for
winning, it probably is a necessary one.

Likewise for startups. Sleep deprivation is not a sufficient condition for
winning, but empirically it seems to be a necessary one. Not long-term,
obviously, but during certain peak times. Even at YC there are times when we
have to work so hard that we sleep less. On interview weekends, for example.

So the reason people who work hard (not just in startups, but in all fields)
treat sleep deprivation as a badge of honor is that it's a sign that one has
the necessary commitment not to cave when there are spikes of work.

~~~
nostrademons
"Sleep deprivation is not a sufficient condition for winning, but empirically
it seems to be a necessary one."

It doesn't seem to be a necessary one either, given the existence of
counterexamples. Eg. Pierre Omidyar started E-bay while keeping his day job
and adamantly refused to work more than 8 hours/day on it even after going
full-time. One of the reasons he stepped back from a management position was
that he didn't culturally fit in with E-bay after hiring a few work-through-
the-night cowboy coders.

~~~
pg
Not everyone in a startup has to work hard, so long as some people do. But
someone had to be carrying a pager when the servers went down, or eBay
wouldn't still exist.

~~~
danohuiginn
Being on call out of hours isn't the same as working (too) hard. 40-hour week,
plus being paged a few times a month to deal with 4am crises, is perfectly
reasonable. So is pulling the occasional all-nighter to meet a deadline.

The article is talking about something completely different: putting yourself
in a state of constant sleep-deprivation through working ridiculous hours. And
the author is right: that's not half as effective as people claim.

------
mhartl
This might be better titled " _Chronic_ sleep deprivation is not a badge of
honor", but the point is well-made. Being sleep-deprived is like being drunk:
you're not competent to realize how incompetent you've become.

~~~
dissenter
>This might be better titled "Chronic sleep deprivation is not a badge of
honor"

The original title is better. It makes perfect sense. It expresses the same
meaning. He is clearly referring to the phenomenon of sleep deprivation and
not to a single instance. It's clear from the title, and the article even
explicitly points this out.

He isn't writing legalese. He doesn't have to gird every sentence against
being taken out of context and nitpicked. To do so would be bad English (as
your example demonstrates).

I know we live in a fast food, sound bite time. I know we expect headlines to
be clear and to the point. His is. And it uses better language.

The last thirty years have placed a tremendous strain on the language. We have
lots more to talk about and not many more words to do it with. The solution
isn't to pile on more and more qualifiers. You can never attain absolute
precision. The solution is to realize that as the number of things we have to
talk about increases, the expressiveness of the language expands to account
for them.

You can't fit everything into a sound bite. If it's worth talking about, it's
worth explaining at length. And if it's worth explaining at length, you might
as well use good English.

~~~
mhartl
Please tone it down. I made a suggestion for adding _one_ word to the title,
and said it _might_ be better. That is a flimsy pretext for such a vitriolic
response.

The first sentence wasn't even my main point; the second sentence was. You
write, "He doesn't have to gird every sentence against being taken out of
context and nitpicked." Extend me the same courtesy.

------
Tamerlin
Good article... and it reminds me of the messes that I've had to clean up at
various jobs; in every case, the people who were working the insanely long
hours weren't getting as much done as I was, and since I was getting my work
done, I had to clean up their messes. The people working the 80+ hour work
weeks typically ended up causing more harm than good, and also typically got
more rewards and respect from the management because of their "dedication" to
the job.

Never mind that most of the code they wrote didn't work until someone else
fixed it.

------
sgoraya
The 'badge of honor' concept rang true for me while working the videogame
industry - The crunch period was often times discussed with great pride, 'Man,
I was up for two straight days fixing the item bug!'

The ironic thing was that more bugs were being introduced during this period
than the 'regular' development period (We measured it during one of my last
projects).

Our conclusion was that we'll work as hard as it takes, but sleep was
necessary - We mandated that everyone get rest after 10 hours at the office
(on the couch, under the desk, or at home). Though since I left, they went
back to their old ways.

------
spydez
This is why I wish more software jobs had flexible hours. The vast majority of
programmers have absolutely no need to be in their office at some predefined
hour. So if you had to work late one night, it'd be nice to be able to sleep
some of it off the next day. But no... Megacorp wants you in your chair by 8.

And as a night owl, I can not fall asleep before 2-3ish am, but I have to be
at work by 8 or 8:30, so I'm constantly working with some sleep deprivation.

~~~
goofygrin
I second this.

Personally I am super productive from about 9pm to 2-3am.

But I need to be at the client at a reasonable hour (9am-9:30am).

Lately I've taken to hacking away from about 9pm to midnight then going to bed
so that I can keep everyone happy. Of course, I tend to toss and turn a bit
because there is always something that my mind is chewing on that I left off
at midnight.

Weekends, all bets are off and my sleep schedule gets totally messed up with
late nights and early mornings (2 year old kid). Ugh, I am not 18 any more :)

~~~
joshstaiger
I have the same tossing and turning problem when I work close to bed time.

I find that reading a fiction book, even just a few pages, helps flush my
brain's "cache" and relax.

------
TrevorJ
I can second this whole-heartedly. Especially the point about motivation. I
find the lack of sleep really kills my willpower and I end up being really
unable to do anything that doesn't interest me.

------
neilc

      So trying to extract 110% performance from today when it
      means having only 70% performance available tomorrow is a
      bad deal. You end up with just 77% of your available peak.
    

Uh, not quite: x(1.1) + x(0.7) != 0.77(2x). Reminds me of the fuzzy math in
DHH's startup revenue calculations...

~~~
Retric
I think it might be more accurate to say work per day = (x(1.1) + N * x(1.1 *
.7))/(n+1) = x(1.1 + n * .77) / (n+1)

So as your number of days approaches infinity average work / day approaches
77% of your old work per day. Or on your second day you only get 77% of your
normal work day done.

------
mattknox
It might not be a badge of honor, but it is often the best thing to do in the
short term. This isn't even new to startups. My grandfather was looking for
work in the middle of the Depression, and got a 2-day 'feel-you-out' kind of
assignment at a gold mine. So he worked 48 hours at a shot, and got the job.

------
axod
Depriving yourself of sleep for long periods of time is obviously not good.
But pulling a couple of all-nighters a week when needed is pretty necessary if
you want to get anywhere IMHO.

~~~
Tamerlin
I think it's the "when needed" part that is the real problem. Most startups
use being a startup as an excuse to justify a perpetual crunch mode to make up
for poor planning.

All three of the startups I worked for over the years tried that, and none of
them have gone anywhere significant. All of them ended up laying off a lot of
people.

------
vidar
Max Levchin had some insights on this in his interview with Robert X. Cringely
(NerdTV).

<http://www.pbs.org/cringely/nerdtv/transcripts/002.html>

------
smalter
someone tell this to david blaine

------
sabat
(For once) I agree with 37 Signals. I'll go ya one further: if you plan well,
there is no need to chronically work 12+ hour days. Really.

In pre-dot-bomb startups, we used to work like that -- mainly because we were
writing tools and infrastructure that now exists in generic form. For free. On
the inter-webs.

I'm just saying. :-)

