

Ask YC: What kind of hours do all of you hackers work? - whalesalad

I'm curious to know because I work in Honolulu for a new startup, and there aren't many of us down here. I actually "technically" work for two startups, so that makes it even harder because both of them need 110% percent of me and at this stage in the game its not possible to leave either of them (despite how, in any other circumstance, it would be better for both parties to give up on one)<p>Anyways, here's what my sleep schedule looks like.<p>Usually the weekends get my pretty screwed up, because I will be awake until the sun comes out. It's not the smartest idea because I'm actually not that efficient if my sleep schedule is constantly changing, but like I mentioned earlier, two projects means balls to the wall all the time and im having a hard time getting a grip on everything.<p>I tend to sleep for a while, generally forcing myself to get out of bed after 6 hours or so, then its back at it. During the work week (my real "job", the startup here in Hawaii) I tend to get in around noon every day or later, and then work as late as I can before heading home to work on the other project. Most of the people in this environment are 9-5'ers (or even worse, in Hawaii the city is alive and full speed ahead by 6am every day, and shuts down at 4).<p>What do you guys do up in the Silicon Valley? Are you more of the type that just work as long as you can, sleep for any amount of time, and get back at it? Do you try and keep a regimented schedule? I'm anxious to hear about all of this because sleep and time and all that is related is really the story of my life right now. hah.
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swombat
I started up two companies while still working a full-time job. Good luck, I
know it's not easy, by far.

You gotta do what works for you and gives you enough time. I think a good
approach is to figure out which part of the day is your most "high quality
time", and be sure to work on your highest priority in that time.

For me, I found that morning was my quality time. After a whole day of
working, I just didn't have the energy to _do_ stuff anymore. Since I had a
strict 9-6 job in a bank/consulting firm, I had to put my quality time before
that.

So, for 6 months or so, I woke up at about 4am every morning, then worked for
3 hours, then had a 1-hour nap, then went to work. I'd go to bed before 10pm
(else I couldn't work the next day). Sometimes I had evening meetings for my
second startup, just to keep things even busier.

The most important thing, I found, was actually to get the support of your
friends/partner/etc. My girlfriend was really understanding and cooked dinner
for me every evening (even though she hates cooking) and that probably saved
me a precious 45 minutes every day. Makes a lot of difference when you're
really overloaded.

Anyway, so, simple method: \- prioritise your startups \- allocate the quality
time each day to your number 1 priority \- make sure your
friends/family/partner support you 100%

Oh, re: constant/changing schedule, I kept a mostly constant sleep schedule,
because otherwise I couldn't cope. So I woke up at 4am every day during the
week - gave myself an extra 2 hours of sleep on the weekend by waking up at 6.
Went to bed at 10 pretty much every night though, week and weekend.

PS: I should add I also took some Modafinil in the morning, that helped wake
me up while still allowing a morning nap.

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fendale
I struggle to see how anyone can be productive at all working all your waking
hours. The only result of that is going to be burnout or stress related
illness.

I don't have or work for a startup granted, but when I am working on something
hard, I reckon I have 5 - 7 hours a day in me and then I am just wasting time
- it was the same studying for exams and my degree - I have never pulled an
all nighter for an exam, but still managed to get the top grade - proper rest
and relaxation are just as important as the working time - properly rested you
will get far more done in less time too!

Oh and leave some time for exercise - that helps you productivity, stress and
well being no-end!

~~~
wallflower
DHH, the creator of Ruby on Rails, recently talked about getting more sleep.
Too much emphasis, he said, is put on the superman mystique of the coder who
codes 12 hours/day. We should stop bragging about how little sleep we get and
instead wake up rested and productive.

"projects are not dependent on what happens in one day"

As a personal note, from experiencing this many times... once you get sick
(which can be accelerated by lack of sleep + diet + stress), the wheels fall
off everything (startup/coding? try getting out of bed)

~~~
Tamerlin
In the 12 years that I've largely wasted as a professional software engineer,
what I've noticed is that the best developers never work a lot of overtime for
extended periods of time. Sure, it happens that they end up staying late to
get something done now and then, but it's very rare.

The bad ones make up for taking the "shut up and code" methodology and
spending hours and hours trying to get their pointlessly complicated solutions
to work, rather than trying to do it right in the first place. The results,
assuming they work, are almost invariably a morass of undocumented spaghetti
code. It makes you wonder; what were they doing with all that time? If they
weren't documenting their code, then the options are: a) they were faking it
b) hunting for code that solves their problem on the internet to hide the fact
that they couldn't write it themselvse c) wasting time debugging their own
mess because they couldn't remember what the code they wrote last night at
11pm was supposed to do, but they were too tired and rushed to bother with
little things like documentation

The let's work a 12+ hour day approach isn't how you get the job done, it's
how you achieve job security when you work for a big company.

~~~
fendale
Yea, in the big companies, you would not believe how often I have seen someone
'recognised' and given great praise for being in the office real late pulling
a release out of the fire - almost everytime it was that very person that put
it into the fire to begin with - The ones that just got the thing to work and
went home didn't even feature on the radar!

Sometimes I think the way to progress in a big company is to make a hash of
things and then stay late fixing them - that doesn't compute with me though -
they are bound to get found out at some point, right?

~~~
Tamerlin
Sort of. Those are the ones that tend to get promoted to management roles and
proceed to use the same reward system for the people who come after them.

In the end, you end up with a culture of long work hours because "that's how
it's done" rather than for any rational reason.

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rms
>I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but
they've always worked for me. -Hunter S. Thompson

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colinplamondon
Most days I wake up around 6am and go for a couple of dives, as I'm working on
my Divemaster certification in the mornings. Great deal, if anyone's
interested- you pay $700 for the course and get unlimited dives for as long as
you're working on your certification, which can be dragged out to four months
of diving every day. Plus, it's on a Thai island (Koh Tao), so cost of living
is quite cheap. $200/month for a bungalow, and $1.50 for some incredible phad
thai.

Get back around noon from diving, get some lunch, work until 2-3am. Likely too
much, but in the early startup phase of doing a startup there's simply a lot
of work to do.

As an aside, I don't really understand the whole weekend thing, if it's
necessary to take a break from your day to day life then there's probably
something wrong with your day to day life.

~~~
daveungerer
I'm actually interested in spending a few months in Thailand. Quit my job a
few weeks ago so I'm going to be relaxing at first, then work on the first
project I have planned while continuing to travel.

How's the internet access where you are? Do you ever do anything else than
diving for fun? Found Ko Tao on Wikipedia and it sounds great, but I'd like to
see other parts of Thailand too. Have you been around?

My e-mail is in my profile if you prefer that.

~~~
colinplamondon
Someone else emailed me asking as well, I'm thinking I'll have to write a blog
article on heading out here...

But yeah! Email sent. Short answer for those interested:

Internet access is... acceptable. I brought an Airport Express and upon
arriving at the scuba resort here I just asked them if I could plug it in.
They'd been hoping to setup wireless for a while but hadn't had a router, so
they were fine with it. Voila, wireless. Problem being, it's usually 5-20kb/s,
with my co-founder getting up to 200kb/s. I think it's because he has Wireless
N to my Wireless B/G. Should have upgraded to a newer laptop before leaving,
but live and learn.

Sure, hanging out and talking with friends at one of the beachside bars, going
driving around the island and exploring, or reading/writing. I'm pretty easy
to please when it comes to having fun, just give me a great conversation in a
cool locale, whether that be a SF coffee shop, a BA tango club, or a Koh Tao
beach, and I'm good to go.

Haven't been around, as of yet. Upon getting into Bangkok's airport I booked a
domestic flight on over to Koh Samui and got there three hours after arriving
in Bangkok. Koh Samui was a lot more touristy than Koh Tao, and in general
just seemed to be developed too quickly. When I first got there I was amazed
(beach! warm weather! jungle!), but in retrospect I prefer Koh Tao by leaps
and bounds.

If anyone else has any questions, I'm not great about checking Hacker News
comments, so feel free to hit me up by email as well, it's in my profile.

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ScottWhigham
I'm in Dallas but I thought this was an interesting question and I want to
take part :)

I'm an early-morning riser. I have two kids[0,4] and a loving wife. I like to
be finished with work no later than 6:00PM and usually closer to 5:30. I still
have to work 12-14 hour days so I wake up at 3:00AM two days, sleep as late as
I can on the third day. I do that pretty religiously although some weeks it's
a 4:00AM wake up (or not at all). Sometimes I get burned out after a few
months and then I'll just sleep until I wake up for a week of so.

~~~
aggieben
Whatcha workin' on? I'm near Dallas too, always on the lookout for other
geeks.

/me has wife and kids too

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edw519
I am running a marathon, not a sprint, so I frame my long working hours within
a "healthy schedule". My typical day:

    
    
      7:00 am - immediately start coding last night's plan, then email, headlines, HN
      8 to 9 - exercise
      9 - breakfast & internet
      9:30 to 12 - code
      12 - lunch & internet
      12:30 to 6 - code
      6 - dinner with family (home or restaurant)
      7 to 9 - code
      9 to 11 - computer off, pencil/paper, analysis, design, detail plan for tomorrow
    

Exceptions: one to two days per week consulting (still keep my night
schedule), one day per week with family, occasional sports on TV. I could keep
this up forever.

~~~
webwright
If you manage 10 hours a day coding and less than 1h day on email PLUS
blogs/news, you are a pretty unique animal. We had a RescueTime group of YC
Founders running during the Winter08 session, and I don't think anyone in the
group EVER hit 10 hours of coding in a single day. Much less sustained it.

I'm also suspicious of the <1hr I see alotted for email _and_ news (all while
getting 7000+ karma here?!). If that's the case, you are fabulously unique
(I'm saying this with a database of data with millions of man hours of
attention data-- lots of them from web developers).

Of course, maybe you mean what most people mean when they say "I'm coding",
which is a distracted mishmash of IM, news, and email, with a light sprinkling
of actual coding in there.

I hereby challenge you to use RescueTime for 1 week and then take a screenshot
of your dashboard. :-)

~~~
kirubakaran
_> We had a RescueTime group of YC Founders running during the Winter08
session, and I don't think anyone in the group EVER hit 10 hours of coding in
a single day. Much less sustained it._

Can you please share what the maximum, median etc for this group was? I want
to see where I stand.

~~~
nostrademons
I'll share my data. My max was 6.5 hours of coding. Since January, I've had 7
days where I spent more than 5 hours coding. My average (as given by the
trendline) is about 3 hours/day.

Coding is my top (computer) activity on average. I spend about 45 minutes each
on Reddit and news.YC; there's also a big long tail of time spent on untagged
apps (often only 20 minutes or so each over the past half-year, but the total
is nearly as much as Reddit + news.YC).

~~~
kirubakaran
You are my A-List hacker :-p So, extra thanks for the data.

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lux
I tend to cycle through different patterns, often depending on workload,
season changes, etc. I'm currently up pretty much all night and sleeping in
until noonish, and since I set my own hours I often just get done
communication stuff during the day then work on programming at night, with
some socializing in between :)

It can be challenging though, since staying up late can create a tendency to
overwork, and often in a fairly unproductive way. I try to keep semi-balanced
with a less-is-more approach. You don't need or want to code 12 hours a day.
If I can do 6 hours I've had a really good day. If I get at least one good bit
of work done, even if it took an hour to do, I'm happy with that. And that
seems to be a realistic pace compared to other programmers anyway, in my
experience at least. Not to say others are slow, I just mean that throwing
more hours at a problem is often a lot like throwing more programmers on a
project: there's a decrease in efficiency with each one added.

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truebosko
Get sleep and stay healthy because that way you'll be the most productive

Some days I'll code away from 9-7pm, some from 10am-12pm because I'm just too
tired.

Have a life, get sleep, and balance it all out. Think of how much you'll get
done sooner if you aren't re-typing half your shit for stupid bugs you made on
that 3am binge

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orlick
I've been keeping pretty close tabs on my hours for the past few months and
find that I generally average about 6 hours of really focused and productive
work per day. It's really hard for me to get into the productive zone so I
might actually be sitting at the computer for 10 hours procrastinating.

~~~
LogicHoleFlaw
I find that I am much more productive when I go do something else when I find
myself wasting time on the PC. I'll come back refreshed and ready to go.

"butt-time" is the bane of my existence.

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yaj
My schedule have this priority: day job - startup - sleep - fun.(besides
programming)

Day job - 8 hours on weekday

Startup - 3 hours on weekday, 6 hours on weekend (minimum)

Sleep - 6 hours

Fun - unrestricted as long as I get my minimum hours for startup and sleep

Prioritizing works better for me rather than a schedule. I usually work on the
startup longer but if anyone invites me to hangout No problem as long as I get
my minimum hours.

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tadej
I'm working my full-time job and in my startup (along with a couple of
personal projects) - and I was close to burn-out several times during the past
couple of months.

I always have a flexible work schedule, but I usually start around 8-10 am and
stop at around 8-10 pm :).

LOTS OF EXERCISE (jogging in the nearby woods)

And I'm definitely working on getting closer to 8-10 hrs per day ...

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gtani
this was good: creative/hacking/new territory time in blocks of 3 hours. Other
blocks of time to clean up your SVn repos, hard drive, client accounting,
whatever.

[http://abstractgeneratorfactory.blogspot.com/2008/06/working...](http://abstractgeneratorfactory.blogspot.com/2008/06/working-
from-home-woe.html)

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Harkins
I work 11 AM to 11:30 if the projects are uninteresting. I work 7 AM around
the clock to 2 PM if the project is good.

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keizo
what's your startup in town? I'm in Kailua doing a not at all related to
programming or hacking startup.

