
“There is no justifiable reason to be working 100+ hours a week." - minimaxir
https://facebook.com/groups/759985267390294?view=permalink&id=1424100054312142
======
seldo
Reminds me of this great presentation:
[http://lunar.lostgarden.com/Rules%20of%20Productivity.pdf](http://lunar.lostgarden.com/Rules%20of%20Productivity.pdf)

Especially this graph of productivity over time:
[https://slides.com/seldo/makersquare-6-stuff-everybody-
knows...](https://slides.com/seldo/makersquare-6-stuff-everybody-
knows/live#/102)

TLDR: if you crunch for 4 weeks it will take you so long to recover that it'll
be as if you never crunched.

~~~
maverick_iceman
Source? Also is the 4 weeks time a universal constant?

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codingdave
I recall an interview once where I was told that everyone on the team put in
60+ hour weeks, every week. They then said something along the lines of, "Hey,
nobody has ever turned down a job with us before, just because we work too
hard."

They honestly looked surprised when I offered to be the first and walked out.

~~~
pmiller2
I'd be the second if they told me that. Places like that, with their "live to
work" culture are always shitshows.

~~~
convolvatron
i've worked 100 hours for a year at a time. thats not living to work. that's
being a useless zombie

nothing quite stings like being woken up from sleeping underneath your desk at
8 am, not having left the office for a week and smelling like a rabid dog and
being told that your level of commitment is disappointing.

~~~
nodesocket
I'm sorry to hear this. Was this for a company? If you can say, love to know
which one so I know to never apply or recommend them. I really can only do
around 5-7 hours of solid productive programming a day. Otherwise my brain
gets fried and quality, innovation, and speed diminish.

I've done three bootstrapped startups (none ever raised VC capital), and while
I usually work every day of the week, it is typically 4-10 hours a day.

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minimaxir
OP of the rant here:

I wrote this in response to another post about a "15-year old founder who
works 130 hours a week ‘pure hustle’" and the backpatting that followed in the
comments:
[https://www.facebook.com/groups/hackathonhackers/permalink/1...](https://www.facebook.com/groups/hackathonhackers/permalink/1422409584481189/)

~~~
wheelerwj
okay that's just absurd and literally inhuman. 18 hours of
sleep/eat/rejuvination is.. not possible.

best case scenario this is one of the 'runrate math' scenarios where someone
worked one 18 hour day and multipled by 7.

~~~
WalterSear
It's also bullshit, every single time.

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darkstar999
I work for a web agency who bills my time directly to the client, but I get
paid salary. I would have a very hard time working more than 40 without
feeling like I'm getting ripped off (since I get paid the same amount
regardless of time). I don't understand those of you putting in 60+ unless you
have stake in the company.

~~~
karmajunkie
I have a really hard time billing more than about 30/week without feeling like
i'm being taken advantage of in those situations. There are all kinds of non-
billable activities that you do as an agency developer that need to be
accounted for; hitting 40 billable hours means I did 50+ actual hours,
minimum; oftentimes more.

I went out on my own again after a couple of W2 jobs and this time resolved to
calibrate everything on the assumption of working 20 hours a week, including
my rate. End result: I'm not overworked (not on my client work, anyway), I
don't feel stressed about making my quota, and I have more money coming in
than I ever did as an agency dev. I will probably take another W2 job at some
point but after burning myself out several times on my own startup, compared
to how I feel about my client work (nice and rosy feeling) I feel pretty
confident that I won't let myself get pushed into it from an employer again.

------
kabdib
In my 20s I regularly did 80 hour weeks.

In my 30s it was probably 60 hour weeks, but I once did six back-to-back 100+
hour weeks to ship a feature. Took me a few months to recover from that.

When I was in my late 40s I did a three-week reprise of those back-to-back
100+ hour weeks, and again it took me months to recover. I escaped that
particular group just ahead of a year+ death march that I probably would just
have quit in the middle of.

Sure, you can crunch. There is a cost. I probably would have been a lot
happier not working so much, but honestly I didn't know _how_.

It's still easy to get sucked in, but I'm both too wise and too old to do
heavy crunch hours, though I will happily spend the odd few late nights
getting something out the door.

~~~
edblarney
Agreed. Past 35 there is quite a noticeable recovery period.

Also - I find it's not the actual work ... it's the stress and the relentless
nature of it. 100 feels like watching 3 toddlers every waking moment of the
day.

------
jpeg_hero
Founder of Cisco:
[https://youtu.be/mhz24AR3nIc?t=1m20s](https://youtu.be/mhz24AR3nIc?t=1m20s)

"Sincerity begins at 100 hours per week..."

~~~
andars
I can see dedicating the vast majority of one's time (even 100+ hours a week)
to doing something you deeply care about. I would say, however, that the vast
majority of people, even entrepreneurs, are not in a situation where their
work satisfies that condition. I can only suppose Mr. Bosack's work did.

Nonetheless, idolizing 15 year olds who work 130 hours seriously rubs me the
wrong way.

~~~
mickronome
We already have 10-11 years old that are burnt out by performance related
stress even without such idols, so I'd say idolizing 100hours week for 15
years old are patently insane.

The age of onset for serious stress related psychiatric issues has been
dropping for quite some time, it's all very concerning.

~~~
mickronome
But yes, I agree with you in principle :)

------
yarou
I find it strange that in certain tech shops, the measure of your productivity
is not efficiency, but how many hours you spend physically in the office.

Doesn't this select for inefficient and incompetent employees?

~~~
Mz
No doubt. It is likely rooted in (or related to) the high school thing of
grading good students apparently based on how much they sweat rather than the
quality of their work.

The world at large seems to generally do a poor job of figuring out how to
measure productivity in a good way that promotes the best practices.

------
spdionis
I think 40+ hours weeks happen only in the US. This is one of the reasons I'd
be reluctant to ever work there.

It's very hard to program effectively (effective being the keyword) more than
4-5 hours a day for most people. Sometimes you get that day/week when you're
inspired and work more, but otherwise it's just pointless, maybe even
detrimental, to force yourself.

------
a3n
[http://dilbert.com/strip/1994-12-25](http://dilbert.com/strip/1994-12-25)

------
Ezhik
If you keep pushing yourself like this, you'll crash and burn, and it takes a
_long_ time to recover, trust me on this. Get your 8 hours of sleep, and
remember that you are not a robot. Take care of yourself.

------
carlmcqueen
I'm curious to see what the definition for most here as to what those 100
hours would be. All in the office?

I work for a big corporation and do 40-45 hours a week. I'm paid well, and
have great work life balance. I started at the bottom however where I was not
paid well, worked 50-55 hrs and did not have any balance but endured to help
support the family while my wife completed her doctorate.

My wife practices as well as teaches now. Teaching requires grading and if you
add up all the hours she thinks about her students and takes their emails and
waits for them to turn things in at 11:59 she easily works 50-60 hours but not
'traditional hours'. We have a great night and she comes home and guiltily
brings her laptop to bed to get a little work done, etc.

Maybe I just don't have the drive to make more money than I need to live in
the cheap mid-west and that's a huge driver? Live to work, work to live
differences I suppose.

------
AndrewKemendo
I come at this from the opposite side: Under what circumstances is working
100+ hours a week optimal? I can think of quite a few actually.
Building/updating life critical systems come immediately to mind. Security
vulnerability work, in the same vein.

Let's also not ignore that plenty of people are working 100+ hour weeks. Many
Nurses/Doctors, laborers & construction workers, deployed military members,
movie producers, financial brokers.

I've seen all of these first hand - hell I've done it for extended periods.
Near Christmas of 2010, about a month after I got back to the Pacific from 8
months in Iraq (Those were 90-100 hour work weeks at a minimum), the Koreas
got into a little fracas [1] and it looked like war time for PACOM. That first
week I worked 136 hair on fire hours with 38 of those being straight through.

That's 20 hours working, 4 hours of sleep (usually on a cot in a meeting room)
with meals eaten while reading message traffic and reviewing documents in the
bathroom. The following months were better, but not by much.

In my experience 100+ hour weeks are usually less than 12 months and then a
break. Often though, the break is short (a week or so) and it's time to start
again.

So it's actually not that crazy, but you have to be committed. Most people
aren't that committed, and I find that sad, as there is so much worth
committing yourself to.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombardment_of_Yeonpyeong](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombardment_of_Yeonpyeong)

~~~
will_hughes
> Under what circumstances is working 100+ hours a week optimal? I can think
> of quite a few actually. Building/updating life critical systems come
> immediately to mind. Security vulnerability work, in the same vein.

I would say the opposite.

If someone is working on critical systems where literal life and death is at
stake, I want them rested and at full mental capacity with the ability and
time to think through repercussions to choices they make.

~~~
AndrewKemendo
Agreed generally. I think the rub is where you get systems that are so
specialized that you can't throw bodies at them. The Apollo missions are a
great example of this [1].

So while it would be ideal to be able to have 3 shifts that work on the same
project or codebase, to get the desired speed you need, in practice generally
only a handful of people can manage the complexity.

[1] [http://www.airspacemag.com/space/apollos-
army-31725477/](http://www.airspacemag.com/space/apollos-army-31725477/)

~~~
will_hughes
I'm not suggesting throwing more bodies at a problem is a solution, it's often
not.

Apollo is a good example of artificial deadlines pushing development effort.
What would've been the impact of pushing back? A launch delay? Okay, maybe a
considerable delay. No life was in jeopardy by pushing it back. It was all
political (and maybe some orbital mechanics too).

Similarly for folks working on life critical systems today - sure, $Company
might launch their new thingy sooner, and perhaps nobody dies as a result of
shitty code getting shipped. But a week or two's delay is probably worth it.

If you're responding to an emergency - that's an entirely different situation.
Maybe everything's on fire and you're losing money hand over fist or someone's
life is actually in danger - sure, fine, work the stupid hours to solve the
immediate problem.

------
tomrod
Graduate school found me working more than 100+ hours a week in measured
doses. I have the 40 or so white hairs to prove it.

~~~
hyperbovine
It's funny how much your perspective on graying changes in your early 30s: I
feel like I _earned_ those hairs (for which I also have a PhD to thank) / am
just grateful to have hair at all. My 18-year old self would appalled.

~~~
tomrod
I hear that!

------
crdoconnor
I've noticed that the managers and companies that do this seem to be fostering
cult-like behavior.

It's obviously deleterious to productivity, but where people consider
themselves to be doing it of their own volition (as opposed to being
threatened with termination), it does seem to breed loyalty and dedication.
The non-loyal get weeded out and the half convinced convince themselves that
they wouldn't be working 100 hours a week without a good reason.

Economically it only makes no sense if you assume that companies are
optimizing for productivity.

------
burger_moon
In a field I used to work in we did 84hr weeks (7-12s) for a few month
stretches then a little break to normal hours or time off before ramping up
again. This was physical labor work however. There's no way I could work that
schedule productively in a programming job. That was one of the hard things to
get over when I went from skilled trades jobs to programming. It's a different
kind of exhaustion you feel from working long ass hours and it's much harder
for me to concentrate on code after hour 10.

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Mandatum
As a contractor, I'm OK with companies that want me to work 100 hour weeks. If
I get a 3-month contract, that year I'm only working 3 months.

~~~
chii
The problem comes when they want to pay you like you worked 30hr.

~~~
slowmotiony
So...? I can just refuse, can't I?

~~~
AnimalMuppet
Not only can, but should.

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wheelerwj
big fan of measuring the quality of work vs time invested. ive been working on
this myself. i don't necessarily plan to work less over all, but i think id
like to work on other projects. if I can spend 4 hours managing, 4 hours
coding, and 4 hours researching things, and I can accomplish 50 or even 60% of
my my normal 12 hour single topic work load, I'm way ahead and not burning
out.

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johan_larson
I have to wonder how many of the claims of heroic work-weeks really are true.
I think I have worked something close to 80-hour weeks once in my life, and it
left me a complete zombie.

------
mlnhd
No politics.

