
Work Hard, Live Well - sethbannon
https://medium.com/@moskov/work-hard-live-well-ead679cb506d
======
thenomad
I continue to be amazed at the number of people who don't get the whole "after
40-50 hours, you're less productive" thing.

In a very selfish way, I'm rather thankful for it, though. Being able to
outcompete your competition by working less than them is ... nice.

As a side-note: I'd argue that the 40-50 hour thing is _even more important_
for founders. The primary thing that goes pear-shaped if you overwork seems to
be decision-making ability. Having a decision-impaired founder is not optimal,
to put it mildly.

(I speak from personal, recent experience. Normally I stick rigidly to a 40-50
hour workweek, but last year I decided to crunch for a month to release a
film. Looking back, it's pretty obvious that a) my productivity barely
increased from what I'd expect of a 40-hour week and b) my ability to make
effective strategic decisions took a massive, calamitous plunge. It's entirely
possible the film would have been monumentally more successful if I'd stuck to
my guns and done one week of crunch at most. )

I'd love to see some research on 20-hour weeks, incidentally. The productivity
curve is _definitely_ non-intuitive.

~~~
jkot
Under good conditions one can easily work 70 hours/week and stay productive.
But traditional open-office sweatshop with 2 hour commute does not work that
way.

~~~
bonaldi
The research contradicts you, and if you're going by your intuition you're
likely wrong, even about your own performance.

It's exactly your sort of thinking that means the industry keeps working the
way it is

~~~
jo909
While I totally believe the research is right, and see the same results and
draw the same conclusions for myself, I don't think the research can tell
anything about one individual.

The way studies work is to measure the average of a large group. Most people I
assume (I don't have data to back that up) work in jobs that do not have what
jkot meant with "good conditions". So the research finds that _on average_
longer work hours do not result in more work done, and that is good advice for
every employer.

For a motivated individual or small group that can be different, so I believe
such personal accounts and would not tell them they are wrong. I can totally
see how founders, special personalities, people with what I call the "perfect
job" can work much longer than 40 hours without being wrong about their own
performance.

The wrong thing is only to expect that from others or to create an environment
that makes others believe it would be true for them too.

~~~
thenomad
Covered at least in part in [http://ericdodds.com/research-and-the-realities-
of-time-work...](http://ericdodds.com/research-and-the-realities-of-time-
worked/) \- including perception vs reality of productivity in crunch time. He
has a graph on that:

[http://ericdodds.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/graphing-
per...](http://ericdodds.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/graphing-percieved-
productivity-daniel-cook-working-overtime-eric-dodds-productivity-hacking-
blog-series.jpg)

It's possible that some special individuals can work longer hours than average
without productivity loss. However, without hard data to prove you're one of
those individuals, given the above, it may be inadvisable to simply assume you
are...

~~~
falcolas
In addition to this, for every "capable of working more than 40 hours" worker,
there's another "incapable of being productive more than 40 hours" worker.
That's the joy with averages.

So look around you - of the 20 people who are working late hours with you and
believe they are still productive, 10 of them are wildly unproductive, quite
possibly to the point of contributing disproportionally negative productivity
due to writing bugs.

Is the additional 400 man-hours of productive work worth those 400-800 man-
hours spent debugging problems which could have been avoided?

------
epalmer
Just yesterday I was explaining how I did projects to satisfy bank examiners
for a prior employer. The bank examiners would ask us to do work that would,
under normal conditions, take a year, and to do that work in 3 months. I got
great feedback by the examiners on the solutions provided. Better comments
than most of my peers were getting. But the next day my boss would give me
another one of these 80 hr / week problems to solve. Not even a day to breath
again. Darn.

So I left to work in Higher Education where people complain about the workload
and I just laugh. 40 hr work weeks, fun people to work with, and only a few
crazy schedules. We even have time to have a cup of coffee and chat.

My health has improved dramatically, my kids actually now think I'm a good dad
and my wife and I have time for each other.

I got my life back. took a big pay cut, never looked back. Life is too short
to over commit for someone else.

~~~
jazzyb
> I got great feedback by the examiners on the solutions provided. Better
> comments than most of my peers were getting. But the next day my boss would
> give me another one of these 80 hr / week problems to solve.

Isn't it so odd that doing good work efficiently is always "rewarded" with yet
more work to do. In my experience it creates a perverse incentive for workers
to just drag their feet.

~~~
serverholic
I think the logic is that if you reward someone for finishing work quickly
then they will rush through their work and quality will suffer.

The counter-point to that is you can balance that out by having quality
controls such as unit tests and code reviews. If someone writes shitty code
then it'll be pretty obvious and they should be corrected.

------
FlyingSnake
Controversial opinion: I think this is an acute USA/Silicon Valley problem.

I was in similar situation, working 50-55 hours a week for US corps and it was
taking its toll on me. I think the American dream makes people think that work
is the the only goal in life.

Then I moved to Europe and boy what a change! People here work 32-40 hours max
and take bucket loads of vacation. The quality of work these guys produce is
really top notch too.

I wish more people understand that working to death isn't a healthy choice.

~~~
switch007
> Then I moved to Europe and boy what a change! People here work 32-40 hours
> max and take bucket loads of vacation.

Let me guess: you didn't move to the UK? Generalising about Europe is
difficult.

I know people on a 42.5 hour contract, 1/2 hour lunch! My last job was 9am-6pm
with 1 hour lunch (40 hour contract (plus 1 hour commute each way)). I'm now
happily on a 37.5 hour contract with 1 hour lunch.

~~~
eterm
Compared to the US, the UK's legal minimum of 28 days[1] vacation is a bucket
load!

And most full time UK workers are 40 or 37.5 hours, which is still well below
what many US workers report their hours as.

[1] [https://www.gov.uk/holiday-entitlement-
rights/entitlement](https://www.gov.uk/holiday-entitlement-rights/entitlement)

(This includes bank holidays, typically companies will mandate the bank
holidays and give 20 days to be chosen freely.)

~~~
switch007
True, the point about vacation time is valid. Although I'm talking contracted
hours. I haven't looked up any stats of reported hours in the UK.

------
lordnacho
I think a fair bit of long-hours work is just self-flagellation. Gotta prove
to the boss or yourself or your family how seriously you take things. You
could even say it's a replacement for productive work.

Take a look at investment banking, the ultimate waste of productive capacity.
My roommate did this until his boss killed himself, providing a bit of a
wakeup call.

He'd go to work in the morning, sit around all day, and then the boss would
get back from meetings and ask for some presentation to be made. By the next
morning. Stay up until midnight/2am, ie dinner at work and cab home, repeat.
Every day, including weekends.

Nobody who did this thought it made any sense, but people did it anyway. They
wanted to climb the greasy pole.

~~~
ascagnel_
Why not negotiate with the boss to work an off-hours shift if your friend was
going to "sit around all day" while the boss was out? If your friend was an
hourly worker, the IB was wasting money.

~~~
pjc50
It's an investment bank. It's not "work" in the sense of any of the hourly
paid jobs; it's a form of highly sophisticated _emotional_ labour that is
dealmaking for very large amounts of money. In this kind of environment, it's
very important to show "commitment", in the emotional sense, by being there.
What the person is actually doing is irrelevant, it matters only that they're
foregoing whatever else they could be doing with their life in order to make
this deal.

~~~
elros
> it matters only that they're foregoing whatever else they could be doing
> with their life in order to make this deal

That is so sad it almost makes me weep. I am thankful every day that I get to
both work with cutting-edge tech, being productive, and also have a very
healthy work/life balance.

~~~
pjc50
That kind of finance industry lifestyle is more like joining a cult or a
Maoist revolutionary organisation, except the devotion is to money rather than
any other idea. I'd feel sorry for these people but they're generally
educated, intelligent people with other choices who've chosen this lifestyle
because they believe it will make them rich. Not comfortably well off, rich.

They're not workers locked in a garment factory with no fire exits or
immigrants crossing the desert in the hope of finding a job to feed their
family.

------
pjc50
Hoisting my own comment from downthread:

Undoubtably a big reason why salaried staff are overworked: the extra hours
are free to the company. It would be interesting to see how long "long hours"
culture would last if every single staff hour over 40 hours a week had to be
paid for. (Once we got past all the insistence that employees falsify
timesheets, of course).

The flip side of that is that every extra hour you work, you are devaluing
your own compensation by working for free.

~~~
mikekchar
I was just thinking about a colleague of mine today. We both worked in a bit
of a sweat shop, but he was just out of school and was in the period of life
where he was quite happy with 80-90 weeks. But he was also smart (much smarter
than me, alas). He decided to ask our boss for overtime pay. The boss said,
"No, but you can have time off in lieu".

Well, my friend decided to continue to pull crazy hours and every Friday
afternoon at 4:30 (when the boss went home) he went up to the boss and said,
"Here. Sign this. These are my hours for the week." They boss (not being too
bright) just signed it week after week after week.

Eventually a year went by and my industrious friend went up to the HR
department and said, "Here are all of my time sheets for the year. My boss
agreed to giving me time off in lieu. Here's his signature on every sheet.
I've put in 80 hours a week for a year. Now I want a year off".

Of course they couldn't give it to him. After consulting with their lawyer
they gave him time and a half (pro rated on his salary). Then they went to our
boss and made a special rule for our team. Nobody was to work overtime again.
Ever.

Everybody was happy. Except for my boss :-)

~~~
pjc50
That's fantastic. I've known people (consultants) using the 40 hour week to
work four days instead of five, but doing it on the scale of a year is
impressive. The astonishing thing in your story is that the boss didn't simply
deny he'd offered TOIL.

------
oulu2006
I completely agree with this.

The research is uncontroversial by now (many studies point to the same
conclusion).

The trick is maximising those precious 40-50 hours and I think that's where
we've gone up and down, backwards and forwards as an industry over the years.
We've ended up with a lot of shoddy tooling and unnecessary complexity with
our programming paradigms.

Only in the past year have I managed to figure out a way to work 50 hr weeks
with the right tooling/programming language and have increased my output! And
only by meeting someone else who had made the same mistakes I was making and
then helped me discover what I was doing wrong.

Quite enlightening when I was on the verge of quitting the industry because I
just kept thinking "this has to be so much simpler than how I'm doing it" and
not really knowing how to make it so.

~~~
griffiths
Can you share the right tooling/programming language that helped you increase
your output? And what were some of the mistakes you mentioned? thx.

------
rmc
Your employer isn't the most important person in your life.

Who cares if taking care of yourself makes you a better employee (it might
not). Your life is more important than your employer's shareholder value.

~~~
lordnacho
That attitude would work if more people had it, and there are areas of life
where it does work. Mostly though, you can expect a race to the bottom with
people who think they should be outcompeting you by burning the midnight oil.

~~~
jasonkester
Keep in mind that those people are not your competition.

You're competing on quality (or at least you should be). Being as good at what
you do as you are makes you valuable. And you can get more done in 40 hours
than those other clowns do in 120.

Let other people fight to be the cheapest and the most willing to be
exploited. You're the guy the smart companies go to when they need somebody
truly good.

~~~
Disruptive_Dave
You've hit on the underlying problem of this entire discussion; the way
employees are judged. Regardless of what annual review process paperwork says,
or what ideals we all pay lip service to, the fact remains that many (in the
US, at least) businesses do not actually reward employees (salary, promotions,
better projects) based on output and productivity. Between political games,
friends helping friends, back-scratchings galore, and very different workplace
experiences based on who your direct manager is, the system is seemingly
FUBAR.

------
mellavora
I don't know. The thing is, it is hard to define "work." All that is clear is
that you spend 168 hrs/week engaged in something. Some of that is sleep. Some
is eating. Some is writing code, or making plans, or talking with people.

For the last 9 months, I've spend 60-80 of those hours each week putting
conscious attention to items directly related to founding my company. Let's
call that "work."

But you can also call it "creation." Most of this time I am outside my self.
What is being drained or used?

What is different in the time I am not "creating"? My mind is still doing
things. What is the difference between "writing the marketing section of the
business plan" and "reading a novel"? Does one use less mental energy than the
other? I've read so many novels in my life, I'm tired of them. I don't like
the way they lock my mind into their train of thought. Reading the novel
becomes draining. TV is pure hell. Better to create, to engage in the
intricate dance of love and passion with my Muse.

I do take a nice nap in the middle of most days. And it is nice to watch the
birds flying in the valley, to lift big heavy things, and to eat good steak.

~~~
AndrewKemendo
_For the last 9 months, I 've spend 60-80 of those hours each week putting
conscious attention to items directly related to founding my company. Let's
call that "work."_

This is it exactly. Someone told me recently: "To make it huge in business, it
needs to also be your hobby." That rung really true for me as a founder. My
"work" now used to be the thing I did when I got off of work at the end of the
day. Now I get to do it all the time and it's great, why would I want to do
anything else?

Now, the question is, for non-founders or employees, should we expect them to
be as engaged etc... to the same degree as the founder. I think the answer is
"it depends."

I mentioned this elsewhere but I firmly think that Bezos/Jobs etc... all want
to hire people who are as passionate about their work as a founder is. So
that's who they structure the company around.

~~~
ryandrake
That only works when high-engagement employees' compensation matches the
sacrifice they are making. Why would anyone bring founder-level engagement to
a job with only employee-level compensation? In other words, if you want me to
work the same hours as the crazy founder, offer me founder equity.

~~~
AndrewKemendo
I think that depends on the person.

What you describe is the mercenary style approach - "Well, I've been fucked
over before so pay me!" \- and I think that is totally valid mindset, if
cynical.

The reality is though that for some problem sets or types of work, the work
transcends the tangible benefits. I have to fall back on my time in the
military for this one because I have innumerable examples of people who have
absolutely dedicated their lives to their military job and what they have to
show for it from that perspective is a broken body and a relative pittance;
but you couldn't pay them enough to leave because they love it so much.

So it's not always just about hard compensation.

~~~
ryandrake
Transcends tangible benefits? Are you kidding me? You're talking about cult
members, not employees. They call it "compensation" because it _compensates_
you for doing what you otherwise would not want to be doing. There are two
kinds of people who work 90+ hour weeks: Those who are compensated enormously
for it, and idiots.

~~~
AndrewKemendo
_They call it "compensation" because it _compensates_ you for doing what you
otherwise would not want to be doing._

Ah, there's the rub. The people I am talking about are those who join a
company so that they can do for a salary what they would be doing anyway
without one.

For example we just "hired" someone for only equity because we were working on
a really hard hardware problem that he has been playing with in his part time.
He approached us and suggested coming on board - in fact he did a TON of work
before I even asked him to and before we had any compensation agreements in
place - in fact I was the one who pushed him to let us compensate him in the
best way we have available right now because he is stuck at another job.

Maybe you don't actually care about what you do, or believe in it or whatever,
but there do exist those who do and want to work on it.

Woz is the best example of this.

~~~
ryandrake
When you say "they would be doing it anyway without a salary" are you really
saying that you have employees who would otherwise work on your project
anyway, without pay? I don't know anyone for whom this is true, but if you've
found one, congratulations.

Don't get me wrong--I care about what I do. So much so that I put a price on
it. If anything, someone who is willing to do 90 hour weeks while getting
compensated at a level appropriate for 40 hours cares LESS about what he does,
as he is cheapening his profession.

~~~
AndrewKemendo
No, what I am saying is that there are people out there working on technology
on their own because they are interested in it and love doing it and if given
the chance some of those people would drop everything to work on that
technology.

Not that they would or should work for free, but that there are, as I said,
intangible reasons that people join projects and work 80 hour weeks that
aren't just compensation.

~~~
Daishiman
Sure, and as soon as you need to do something they don't really want, they are
out of the game.

They have nothing to lose by getting off the train, and thus the amount of
leverage they have is enormous.

Most people need to put a roof on their heads, which is why those things
rarely happen.

------
35h34
> The research is clear: beyond ~40–50 hours per week, the marginal returns
> from additional work decrease rapidly and quickly become negative.

If that is really true, what does it say about people who are working full-
time _and_ trying to do a project on the side?

Are all the people who successfully do that outliers? To have a successful
side project do you need to spend less time doing actual work at work? Is
there a ticking time-bomb once you start working on a side project
(effectively entering a "crunch time"), where after a certain amount of time
you're doomed to fail unless you take a break?

~~~
rwallace
Let me put it this way. I ended up making a personal rule: don't start any
more side projects. I should have made that rule earlier.

------
tempodox
It should be, “earn shitloads of money and live well”. Working hard has
nothing to do with it, at best.

------
puranjay
As someone on the creative side of things, I fully agree with this. Beyond 6-7
hours a day, my work quality suffers drastically. Sure, I can probably sit
around before the computer for 12 hours if you want me to. But if you need
actual work, you better let me go by hour 6

------
AndrewKemendo
A question and an observation.

1\. Can anyone name a company on par with Amazon/Uber/SpaceX/Goog etc... where
everyone is working 9-5? Not doubting they exist, it just seems like all the
major high growth big vision companies have this same ethos. Maybe they are
successful despite that, but that would seem anti-pattern

2\. There is a subset of people who do not lose productivity after 40/50/60
hours a week (full disclosure I think I am one of these as my work weeks look
closer to 80-90) and I think that is who these companies are optimizing for.
Amazon doesn't care if it burns out 10 people if it can keep one that is super
passionate and can work like a madman.

~~~
georgefrick
I see lines like this sometimes, and I never speak up. So here goes. You work
16 hour days and it's just fine? You are saying that in your post. It's right
there. 80-90 hours. You expect someone reading your post to believe you work
16 hour days, it's fine; you're a rock star who loses no productivity by the
79th hour on Friday evening?

~~~
roel_v
Even if you're just 10% productive that last hour, that's still more work than
someone who clocked out at 79 hours.

Not saying that everybody should work 80 hours, just that this whole 'working
more than 50 hours is _less_ productive than working 40' is one of those
extraordinary claims that require extraordinary evidence.

Because looking at the _empirical_ evidence, it's the companies where people
work long, hard hours are the successful ones, and not just in software... Try
walking into a Cravath partner meeting, or John Hopkin's neurosurgery ward,
and propose people go home after 40 because it would make them 'better' \-
you'd get laughed out of the room, is where I'd put my money.

~~~
pjc50
_companies where people work long, hard hours are the successful ones_

Can we try a little harder than evidence-free correlation/causation here?

A quick look at the world's largest companies
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_by_r...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_by_revenue)
reveals that the secret of being in the top 10 for success is to be in
oil&gas, or to be Walmart. Most Walmart employees are paid by the hour and
subject to varying schedules outside their control. The highest tech company
is Apple at 17.

Speaking of hourly pay, that is undoubtably a big reason why salaried staff
are overworked: the extra hours are free to the company. It would be
interesting to see how long "long hours" culture would last if every single
staff hour over 40 hours a week had to be paid for. (Once we got past all the
insistence that employees falsify timesheets, of course)

~~~
AndrewKemendo
Have you ever worked an oil job? They are INSANE in terms of hours/labor. I'm
from Houston and grew up in and around oil jobs. Amazon is utopia land
compared with working at EXXON.

~~~
endzone
that's simply not true. i've worked in BIGOIL (not exxon) and working 7-4 was
pretty much the rule.

~~~
jofer
It varies a lot by segment of the industry and the individual team/part of the
company you're in.

I'm a geologist and I've worked for three of the majors. I've seen good work
conditions and I've seen terrible. (This is all office-based work, too. Things
are a _lot_ rougher in the field.)

Essentially all geologists are in the "upstream" side of things (i.e. finding
oil/gas and getting it out of the ground). Upstream has three segments
(exploration, development, and production), and the work-culture depends a lot
on which one of those you're in.

At least in my experience, in exploration things are very schedule-driven. You
work crazy hours all the time to meet arbitrary deadlines. Supposedly, we work
a 9/80 schedule and get every other Friday off. No one is allowed to take
those... It's 7-5 six days a week, and more when it's crunch time. Taking
"vacation" means working from home or only coming in for half a day. We're
required to code our vacation every year, but I've regularly seen people
forced to work through 100% of their vacation time.

Development (oilfield development, not software) is typically a bit more
paced. Most of the work will be on a very regular schedule, except for when
you're responsible for a well that's being drilled. If you're sitting a well,
you're on-call 24/7 for a few weeks. You will have lots of 10pm, 2am, and 6am
conference calls and then go in and work a full day. However, you'll typically
be told to not show up at the office for a week or so afterwards (that's
always informal -- the majors all have strict no comp time rules).

The other segment of upstream is production. I've never worked production, so
I can't comment there.

I'm currently in R&D (software development, actually), and it's much more
relaxed. We have our own personal hell in terms of the amount of paperwork and
meetings that are required to do _anything_, but the hours are more
reasonable.

At any rate, the big companies are all effectively 20-50 semi-independent
small companies, in my experience. The work culture between those small
companies will vary wildly.

------
jxm262
I'm based in the US but have friends in France and Spain. They're constantly
talking about the cultural differences to how we approach work. I've heard
time and time again that many European countries work "smarter" and Americans
are way too focused on number of hours.

It's obviously not true in all jobs, but after hearing this so many times, it
might be time I try a stint in Europe just for the experience.

------
melindajb
The problem with salaried employees is that it encourages the "all-you-can-
eat" mentality with an employee's time.

Economics students will understand that a rational actor will consume a free
thing until the marginal utility of the next unit is zero.

And for a company, the marginal utility of your time is NEVER, EVER Zero.
Unless you're a pilot, maybe, or the control room operator of a nuclear plant.

So, even if you're 10% as productive as normal,that's still incremental labor
at no additional cost.

But for you, that negative utility affects your health, your family, etc.

The solution is serious and strict laws that prevent employer abuse, and to
prevent young people from killing themselves and undermining the value of all
labor. They used to be called unions, but I'll settle for government
regulation.

Another option is to start your own business, where you decide these things;
or to work as a consultant and get paid by the hour. It's AMAZING how much
more efficient some of these startups are, or get, when you charge them
hourly.

When you give your labor away for free you devalue it, and everyone else's
around you.

------
transfire
I heard about a couple of assistant managers with the same job at a big
retailer who managed to setup an alternating three-day-on/three-day-off
schedule. Which works out to 4 days a week. Seems like a pretty clever
approach.

------
biggio
Working hard cannot exist with living well

~~~
MaulingMonkey
Define "working hard".

You can spend your workday distracting yourself with Facebook, or cat gifs,
making awkward water-cooler small talk with other people who, like yourself,
are counting the hours until you go home. This is terribly unfulfilling.

On the other hand, you can spend your workday - the same amount of time, or
even less - focused and productive, getting things done, effecting meaningful
change. Too busy to agonize over the clock, you're pleasantly surprised by the
end of the workday. You feel you've done things worth doing - that you haven't
simply wasted your day on pointless drivel.

I would call the latter "working hard". Taking this definition of "Working
hard", I wonder if it's not _a prerequisite_ of living well.

~~~
jo909
I agree, the best days are when time flies and you are just challenged at the
right level - not to hard to frustrate you, not too easy/repetitive to bore
you. But for me this is not the norm, most days are a mix of too hard and too
easy, so motivation is sometimes a struggle and/or I'm exhausted and glad if I
can go home and recharge for the next day. Even if work is good and fun,
sometimes I'm just so much more exited about something not work related (at
home, with friends, cool new tech), that I'm also eager to leave or am just
distracted while at work.

For me it is "hard" to simply give 100% with no distractions to my fullest
potential for 8 hours. I can't even do that for 8 hours most days, so why
expect me to do it for 12 or even longer, there would quickly be a negative
ROI like the article suggest. I think most people experience work most of the
time more or less like that.

On the other hand on days where everything is just right (also on the weekend
with non work related tasks I'm exited about) and I'm in the flow, hours do
not matter much, and I'm pretty sure I get a positive return from more hours.
At least in the short term, I never had the honour to have such a perfect job
to experience that daily for months to know about the long term.

That is to say that I could see that for somebody a) with a different
personality to shut out distractions, has naturally better motivation or more
energy etc or b) with a "perfect" job, it could be or at least feel different.
It might be/feel so easy to work fully concentrated for 8 or more hours that
"working hard" has to be something even more for them.

~~~
MaulingMonkey
> But for me this is not the norm, most days are a mix of too hard and too
> easy, so motivation is sometimes a struggle and/or I'm exhausted and glad if
> I can go home and recharge for the next day. Even if work is good and fun,
> sometimes I'm just so much more exited about something not work related (at
> home, with friends, cool new tech), that I'm also eager to leave or am just
> distracted while at work.

> For me it is "hard" to simply give 100% with no distractions to my fullest
> potential for 8 hours.

Working hard's not easy, and something I continue to try and figure out how to
optimize further. I use small wagers (e.g. coffee) with coworkers to help with
motivation, noise canceling headphones and asynchronous communication (IRC,
email) to help minimize flow disruptions, website blocks to break idle
browsing habits, task lists and breakdowns to help eliminate "uhh... what
next?" indecision, single-tasking as much as possible...

Friends and new tech I can sometimes integrate into work, but yeah, not
always.

> I can't even do that for 8 hours most days, so why expect me to do it for 12
> or even longer, there would quickly be a negative ROI like the article
> suggest.

At this point, I'll push back hard on management that asks me for more than 8
hours, and it's a serious consideration when job hunting. I'm willing to, on
occasion, put more than that in - if I'm convinced the occasion warrants
sacrificing long term productivity for some very short term gains - but I'm
not willing to let it become a pattern.

Even then, at 12 hours, I'm typically a mindless zombie suitable for little
more than manual input fuzzing (read: mindlessly spamming inputs), running
build scripts that were prepared and debugged earlier, and uploading build
artifacts. I'm not even productive short term for most work tasks anymore.
Even bug fixes may do more harm than good.

I've even managed to frame it as an ethics issue to myself: Allowing my
employer to repeatedly sacrifice my long term productivity for extremely short
term gains is doing wrong by myself, and doing wrong by my employer. Worst
case scenario, if (respectfully) standing up to management gets me fired, or
turns the work environment toxic, I have another opportunity to find a job
that appreciates my work instead of my self-flagellation.

------
rsp1984
_Note: I’ve written this from the perspective of the tech industry, since
that’s my perspective, but the pattern definitely exists prominently in other
industries, and in companies across all industries._

I'd say it's written from the perspective of someone who's already seen a lot
of success and wealth in his life and now has the luxury of writing about how
to live well.

I (and I assume many other founders in the startup world) work about 70 to 80
hours a week. I feel responsibility for my business. If s*t isn't done on a
Friday afternoon and people are waiting for it I'm not going to say "Well it's
home time. See you on Monday". That's just not how it works.

~~~
jasonkester
What happened when you tried working a 40 hour week as an experiment? Did your
business crumble and force you to work 120 hours the next week just to put it
back together? Or did things work out fine? Or have you not tried that?

If you haven't, what do you expect would happen if you did?

From experience, I can tell you that things will work out fine. You'll get
your product shipped, support your customers, and have roughly the same chance
of surviving if you work sane hours.

When I was crunching to ship Twiddla, I would average between 20 and 30 hours
per week. About the same amount of time I dedicated to Rock Climbing,
wandering the streets of Pamplona, and sipping wine on the balcony watching
the world go by with my girlfriend. Every work day I would come in fresh, with
a good idea of what needed building, go heads down in the morning and come up
for air around 3pm to find a cold half cup of morning coffee on my desk, next
to a cold lunch that my girlfriend had evidently snuck in and deposited at
some point.

That was the most productive year of my life. I shipped a product that pays
for my lifestyle today. And I never worked more than 40 hours in a single
week.

I'd recommend you give that a shot. It sounds a lot more enjoyable than what
you're doing.

~~~
rsp1984
It sounds like you have an enjoyable life then. Congratulations. I feel happy
for you.

Look, I am not complaining about my situation. I signed up for this. I like
what I do. I just get really sick when people claim "you are going to be sooo
much more productive" if you work less. Like it was a general truth. Like they
are an authority and know better. Like it applied to everyone and everything
at all times. Like there was no need to look at a particular situation and
then decide if it's a statement that's actually more than a phrase.

And btw I would really appreciate it if people wouldn't down-vote my comments
just because they disagree. That would make this community just a whole lot
better.

~~~
daviross
_Rabbi Israel, the famed "Maggid of Kosnitz," once asked a rich man what he
usually ate. The rich man was rather ascetic; he proudly described to the
Chassidic master his one daily meal, in which he ate and drank nothing more
than bread with salt and a jug of water.

"Fool," scolded the Maggid. "Go home and eat meat and other delicacies. Drink
aged wine. If you don't, I am not finished with you yet!"

Later, the Maggid's disciples wondered why their master spoke as he did. Rabbi
Israel explained: "If the rich man dines on meat and wine, then he would at
least feel that the paupers in his town should be given bread and salt. But if
he himself subsists on dry bread and salt, he might think that poor people
could live on stones..."_

------
thewarrior
Everyone works hard hoping they'll make out like Dustin but they won't. But if
you do it's totally worth it. Money changes a lot of things.

------
jdjxjxxns
>I also hear young developers frequently brag about “48 hour” coding sprints.
This kind of attitude not only hurts young workers who are willing to “step
up” to the expectation, but facilitates ageism and sexism by indirectly
discriminating against people who cannot maintain that kind of schedule

That is a ridiculous argument. "We shouldn't do this thing, because women are
incapable of doing it". Maybe women aren't physically capable of working in
high-pressure fields.

------
Bostonian
I don't think YCombinator expects start-up founders to work only 40-50 hours a
week. Paul Graham has written as follows:

"Economically, you can think of a startup as a way to compress your whole
working life into a few years. Instead of working at a low intensity for forty
years, you work as hard as you possibly can for four. This pays especially
well in technology, where you earn a premium for working fast."

~~~
pjc50
"If you work really hard, you should be able to produce a baby in only three
months!"

