
Watch a VC use my name to sell a con (2011) - shawndumas
http://www.jwz.org/blog/2011/11/watch-a-vc-use-my-name-to-sell-a-con/#
======
pud
Many successful people love what they do. So they work "insane" hours.

For better or worse, these people choose "work" (in quotes because it doesn't
feel like work) over watching TV, taking vacations, and spending time with
friends.

When outsiders observe people like this, outsiders come to the conclusion that
said people are successful because of the long hours. When in fact, they're
successful because they're obsessed with making it successful.

In other words, the takeaway should be "do something you love," rather than
"work long hours."

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_caus...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_causation)

~~~
kenko
Being able to do, and get paid to do, something one loves is a luxury that
very few people have. ("Do something you love" is actually quite impracticable
as advice.) If you happen to love doing something remunerative, bully for you
---but plenty of people have jobs they merely (if they're lucky!) like.

It's also highly questionable that people who are successful are successful
because they're obsessed with making it successful. Obsessives and workaholics
love to play it as if that's what turns the trick, but it's really just as
silly as a sports team attributing its success to having "wanted it more".
What, like the other guys didn't want it?

~~~
kenko
... following up to myself (why not?), it's also important, I think, to resist
the fallacious inference from "X loves his job" to "X would be happy to work
all hours". It really does not hold up, but it's distressingly common in
conversations like this to hear the proviso "well of course if you _love_ your
job you'll work the long hours and that's fine", but one could well love one's
job and have other interests one also considers worth pursuing. Nothing to
excess! (Plus holding the fallacious inference to be sound contributes to its
pernicious contrapositive: "if you don't want to work all hours, you must
dislike it here".)

------
rubyn00bie
I wish more people would read this... the idea that engineers need to work
crazy hours is both abusive and wrong.

We should be working less hours; as the mental capacity and focus required to
do our jobs well is strictly necessary to do a good job.

Just because someone, somewhere, got rich working stupid hours doesn't mean
you will-- if anything you probably won't and why would you want to? Your life
just vanished; because you spent it working like a dog for nothing.

While I think DHH (of Rails fame) is often kind of a douche (I am too, so
don't take too much offense)-- his, public, views on how to run an office and
actually work a start up are vastly better and more realistic for the masses.

~~~
hkmurakami
_I wish more people would read this... the idea that engineers need to work
crazy hours is both abusive and wrong._

This is true not just for engineers, but teachers, manufacturing workers, and
number of people where the workforce size is suppressed and individuals are
stretched to the limit for the benefit of the C suite and the shareholders.

~~~
kenko
Totally agreed.

One not actually unfortunate aspect of the preferability of sane to insane
work hours is that a lot of aspects of corporate culture that are much
esteemed in startup-land are really basically designed to get you to work
insane hours, from undergrad-dorm-esque offices (hey, remember when we pulled
all-nighters all the time and it was totally cool?), to employer provision of
services since you wouldn't otherwise have time to run errands, to, most mind-
bogglingly to me, employer provision of dinner. It really shocks me when I see
a company drawing attention to how it provides free evening meals to its
employees (or just to its engineering staff or whatever), because why the fuck
would I be there at dinner time? And why are you all stretched so thin in the
first place? (I mean, at my actual job, I _am_ there at dinner time, on
occasion. Which is less than ideal. But at least no one acts as if that's a
great state of affairs.) And that doesn't get into the corrosive mindset
according to which your job is supposed to be your primary leisure pursuit as
well, because you love it so damn much.

~~~
nooron
I remember the time I pulled a punch of all nighters in undergrad. I weakened
my immune system and contracted a four-month spell of mono.

It's absolutely a corrosive mindset. It's also one not conducive to learning
new tricks or to meaningful thinking– just shallow processing, to paraphrase
Nassim Taleb.

Don't get me wrong, I'll be up late tonight. I've got some big things tomorrow
that I need to prep for. It happens once in a while.

Sleep's important, but the kind of masochistic bullshit you correctly ID
isn't. Or shouldn't be.

~~~
solistice
I had a similar thing happen to me, but still in highschool, where I pulled
allnighters to make an insanely stringent schedule work so I could catch up to
those pesky A+sians that played the Violin and helped blind orphans speak (or
something along those lines).

I mean workwise, I feel better sprinting short burst than to walk for long
periods, but trying to take on a 4 year death marathon, starting at 6 in the
morning and ending 2 in the evening, wasn't much of a bright idea. I ended up
crashing every second term, to get sick weekly during that time and to pull
down my hard earned grades into the D range.

I believe that the mind is a lot like muscle in that respect. Don't excercise
it, and it will atrophy. Strain it constantly, and it will break down, along
with your bodily health. The point to building mental muscle seems to be
alternating between periods of excertion and recuperation. Anyone telling you
that carrying weights constantly is the path to strenght is proably trying to
get you to build their pyramids, pulling stone slabs up an incline day and
night.

~~~
nooron
Just saw your very eloquent reply to my comment. Great analogy.

------
gatsby
This generated some fantastic responses 2 years ago on HN as well:
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3288671>

------
outside1234
whatever.

for most of us (those launching pure software startups - sorry hardware folks)
we now have the benefit of 6c per hour servers and the luxury of avoiding VCs
completely.

we can burn 12-18c an hour ($133/month) while we find product market fit with
a business model such that adding users adds profit. that's what you are doing
right?

if not, then yes, you are falling into the VC trap.

otherwise, you own your culture. think about what you want.

~~~
solistice
Depends on what kind of hardware though. With certain things, you can test a
product market fit with some ducttape and a lot of creativity. There's a
pretty good book on that called "One simple idea" by Stephen Key, which,
whilst it has a focus on licensing such producs out, should come in handy for
stress testing a hardware idea. And for the more high tech folks that won't go
to the mall to test out whether their stuff will sell, there's still
Kickstarter.

------
GBiT
This is answer written by Mike Arrington in 2011 after this article -
[http://uncrunched.com/2011/11/28/burnouts-vc-cons-and-
slave-...](http://uncrunched.com/2011/11/28/burnouts-vc-cons-and-slave-labor-
a-marxian-drama/)

~~~
nathanb
I think it's interesting that Arrington seems to accidentally agree with
Jamie.

> "I've been burned badly by VCs. Treated unfairly. But my response was simply
> to stop doing what I was doing and start doing something else."

Isn't that exactly what Jamie is saying? Once what you're doing stops being
fun, don't force yourself to keep slogging because you think keeping your nose
to the grindstone will make you rich.

------
Macsenour
No one at the end of their life ever wishes they had worked more hours.

~~~
joonix
really? what about people who wish they had "done more with [their] life" or
"done something more meaningful." I'm sure many people think this. They look
back on an easy-going life with a good amount of leisure and wonder what it
was all for.

~~~
Macsenour
I think that "done more with their life" isn't the same as working more hours.

------
laurentoget
depriving yourself from sleep is demonstrably bad for you. i wonder why we
reached a consensus that smocking crack, drinking underage and driving fast or
without a seatbelt should be forcibly prevented, but driving yourself crazy on
adderall to build an app so people can write a blog on their favorite sushi
restaurants and VC can prosper is socially rewarded.

------
jval
Out of interest, how many hours do successful startup founders tend to work?
Does anyone have a solid view on this, and is there any anecdotal evidence out
of YC to suggest any sort of correlation of this kind?

------
greenyoda
This was posted to HN not so long ago; lots of discussion here:

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3288671>

~~~
larrys
Appears to be that if you put a "#" at the end of the URL it doesn't get
flagged as a repeat.

~~~
randall
Actually, there's some number of items that are new enough that they're dupes,
but after a certain period, they can be resubmitted.

~~~
larrys
Do you know the thinking behind that? (Or what the time length is?)

~~~
randall
PG commented on it forever ago.

The thinking (if I can speculate) probably is that if an item was submitted
that didn't make it to the homepage, but it gets resubmitted a year later and
does make it, it's worth everyone seeing it again.

Or, it could just be too annoying for the less-than-part-time maintainers of
HN to keep the blacklist past 10,000 items or something.

Speculate on. :)

------
visopsys
Totally agree. I view startup as a marathon rather than short run. The most
important thing for an engineer is productivity. I dont think any engineer
would be productive after 8 hours of working. If this happens frequently,
something's wrong with that company.

~~~
wpietri
100% agreed. And maybe more than 100%. I gave a talk a couple years back on
"Building a Sustainable Startup" and said that it was even worse than running
a marathon. Doing a startup was like developing a running career.

You can watch the video if you want, but the relevant gist is that I knew
people who trained for marathons and really wrecked themselves. They did one,
said "never again", and then quit running. Whereas I, a slow fat guy, took my
running much more gradually, and now have been running 7 years. I even just
did my first triathlon a couple months back.

Video here: <http://vimeo.com/24843552>

------
strictfp
IMHO it's not about just putting in hours. It's about believing in what you
strive to acomplish, so that you can make concious choices about which tasks
are useful or not. Once you have a clear goal, go ahead and put in the hours
if you want, but never continue when the goal gets fuzzy. I guess I'm saying
that you primarily have to work conciously and goal-directed. The really hard
work part is secondary, but also probably quite necessary given the size and
complexity of most projects.

------
EScott11
Any particular reason you are reposting this today?

------
mvkel
Arrington is considered a VC now? Yikes.

~~~
dalke
According to Wikipedia's article: "In 2011, Arrington founded a venture
capital firm called CrunchFund along with M.G. Siegler and Patrick Gallaghar."

It seems to me that being a partner at a venture capital firm makes someone a
VC. Why do you think otherwise?

BTW, from CNN: "CrunchFund itself has largely flown-under the radar. It
doesn't even have a website."

~~~
nknighthb
Heh, "under the radar" is an interesting way of looking at it.

They might not make a lot of noise now, but CrunchFund was the trigger for
several days of utter and very public chaos at AOL/TechCrunch when it
launched, leading to Arrington being fired because of AOL's own choices and
disclaimer of journalistic ethics, but not really, but oh maybe really, but
no, but yes, but now he's back, and AOL still doesn't know WTF they're
doing...

------
quchen
If you turn off stylesheets, you can even read the text.

~~~
igorgue
Sigh... This meme of criticizing UX instead of the article is getting old on
HN.

Email jwz your suggestions. Also have you seen his homepage?
<http://www.jwz.org/> OMG, it's like... So horrible hurts my eyes, god who
would care about what jwz says with that design!

~~~
bitwize
Real hackers care about typography, design, and UX.

On HN you're not a real hacker until even your tweets have a colophon.

~~~
jleader
Thanks, I just entertained myself for several minutes imagining jwz's reaction
to being told he's "not a real hacker on HN"!

~~~
bitwize
Well, he only ever uses Macs nowadays, so he's _almost_ there :)

