
How Some Consultants Fake an 80-Hour Workweek (2015) - attfarhan
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/05/upshot/how-some-men-fake-an-80-hour-workweek-and-why-it-matters.html
======
foxfired
When I was hired as a consultant, the very first day I was asked to give an
estimate on how long it will take me to complete the project. (Coincidentally,
it was for a New York Times)

I spent my time studying the code base and the requirement. By the end of the
day, I told them around ~20 hours. It was a fairly easy project.

I spent a month and a half to complete the project. What I didn't take into
account was how long it will take to get resources from them. When I asked a
question, it took anywhere from 48 hours to an entire week to get a response.
When I completed a task, I got no response.

But I needed to be on call because they would sent hundreds of emails about
everything except what was needed. I charged them for all the hours I spent
waiting for them, and reading long emails that led nowhere.

~~~
Infernal
My rule of thumb (can't recall where I first heard of this, but it's not
original) for translating from an engineer "how long will it take me to create
a technical solution" estimate into the real world is to convert the estimate
into the largest whole-number unit (so ~20 hours would be 3 days), then double
the scalar and increment the unit, in this case 3 days would become 6 weeks -
which while not perfect, is much closer to the reality than your original
estimate.

I'm amazed by how often this rule has turned out to be reasonably accurate,
though I'm sure there's some selection bias at work. And it certainly starts
breaking down when you begin estimating in multiple months - however I would
counter that if you're able to credibly estimate months of work on a solution,
then you don't need this particular rule of thumb :)

~~~
Swenrekcah
Berlin Brandenburg Airport was originally supposed to take 5 years, so
according to this it will take 10 decades.

Currently 1.5 decades in.

~~~
projectramo
IF they're smart, they'll just change the estimate to 5 more months and get it
done in 10 years.

------
gringoDan
I'm convinced that most of the long hours of corporate America can be
explained as a form of signaling. This is just more evidence that there are a
whole lot of bullshit jobs out there. [0]

Anecdotally, when I worked as an investment banking analyst, there was hardly
anything to do from 9-5, then 6-8 hours of work was dumped on my desk at 5pm.
Half of that work was un-doing changes I made the day before because the VP on
the team didn't like the updates the Associate wanted. Organizations are set
up to be inefficient in order to signal how serious they are and what hard
workers they have.

[0] [https://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/](https://strikemag.org/bullshit-
jobs/)

~~~
da02
Was this the reason or part of the reason you left being an investment banking
analyst? What's the educational requirements/qualifications to for an
investment banking analyst?

~~~
rohitb91
Not OP but to get in generally go to an ivy league school, or go to a non
target with an amazing GPA, ECs and luck, or have connections.

~~~
gringoDan
OP here - I agree with this. If you're at an Ivy the banks and consulting
firms come to you, then it's just a matter of 1) studying the basic interview
questions and being able to speak semi-intelligently about financial topics
and 2) interviewing a ton until you find a firm with people similar to you and
like your personality.

I left because I was depressed during the job and realized I wanted work with
fewer hours that was more intellectually challenging. I saw people 2-3 years
ahead of me in their careers leaving for startups and thought I'd skip the 2
years of misery and do that straight away.

~~~
da02
What industry/field did you go into afterwards? B2B or B2C startups?

~~~
gringoDan
I've worked in both. I'm of the opinion that early on in your career it really
doesn't matter, you could do either. There are far more important things to
think about (company & personal growth trajectory, coworkers & culture,
learning opportunities, etc.) when choosing a company.

------
NikolaNovak
Interesting but unsurprising article.

I receive a thank you note from our practice lead every time my utilization
exceeds 100% in a week. I have repeatedly asked to be removed from such
"congratulatory" emails, as I don't find it something to be lauded. In my
mind, this means I/we have not properly planned, scheduled, costed, or staffed
a project.

Market disagrees though; long hours are absolutely the norm in my segment, and
while I've seen managers of all types, those more and less understanding that
there's life outside of the office, nonetheless there is an overall feeling
that if you're not working long hours, you're not working hard or contributing
or dedicated enough.

At the same time, it is an accepted paradigm that project/client/company will
suck what they can out of you, and it's up to you to set the limits,
communicate them and deliver quality. I have observed people who at beginning
of the project indicate "I _will_ take my vacation, and I _will_ spend my
weekends at home", and due to quality of their work and abilities, are
respected, promoted, recognized.

So there's culture and there's individual response to the culture.

[personally, I "enjoy" a sprint or two every now and then, there's excitement
in building something and working hard towards it; but still believe that
continued crunches are failure of planning. That doesn't mean I'm immune to
them :P, just that I refuse to consider them the norm]

------
thrower123
Well, duh. I can't even work a full 40 hour week as a programmer without being
completely braindead.

I think the dirty secret is that as long as you hit the meetings you're
supposed to be at, and show your face at strategically useful times, nobody
cares the slightest whether you are actually there or not - as long as the
work gets done.

> The result of this is easy to see: Those specifically requesting a lighter
> workload, who were disproportionately women, suffered in their performance
> reviews; those who took a lighter workload more discreetly didn’t suffer.
> The maxim of “ask forgiveness, not permission” seemed to apply.

This is generally good advice to live by. If something is worth doing, you are
wildly better off just doing it, rather than asking for permission to do it.
At best, the thing you wanted to do will get denied, and at worst so crusted
up with input and bikeshedding from everyone that is sucked into it that it is
actively detrimental.

~~~
baddox
> nobody cares the slightest whether you are actually there or not - as long
> as the work gets done.

That only works if the people with authority have the desire and ability to
determine whether the work is being done. When they don’t, easy metrics like
working hours unfortunately are what they care about.

~~~
WaxProlix
Even easier because then you don't have to do the work; just make extra sure
that you've put in the face time to the right moments.

------
galvarez800
This makes perfect sense to me. From what I've seen anecdotally, it seems most
people can work 80-hour weeks at full productivity for maybe one or two weeks,
tops. After that, the fatigue starts to set in and that person's performance
starts to decline. In the long run, the person working 80 hour weeks isn't
getting much more done than someone working far fewer hours, simply because
during those 80 hours they are operating at greatly diminished mental
capacity.

~~~
cma
Depends if they are engaged or not and how taxing it is. People can play MMOs
or MOBAs way past 40hr/week and they don't all have a huge performance
dropoff. They are probably more prone to RSI and stuff at more hours though.

I wouldn't be surprised to see a productive 100hr week in some kind of MMO
player.

~~~
JamesBarney
I think the OP is talking about knowledge workers specifically. If you're a
security guard, I think it's obvious you could do your job for 100 hrs with
very little drop off in performance.

~~~
chris_mc
Don't think that's true, watchstanding positions are amongst the most mind
numbing jobs that actually require your full attention. I stood watch in the
Navy as officer of the deck in port, and I can truly say that 6 hour shift was
torture for the mind, much worse than coding 6 hours.

~~~
Aeolun
To a point I guess, but I imagine the drop off in performance from 2 hours to
8 hours of standing watch is much larger than the one from 8 to 20 hours.

~~~
chris_mc
From 8 to 20 hours watchstanding, you're basically not watchstanding. It went
like this:

    
    
        Hour 1: Fine
    
        Hour 2: Walk around a bit, then fine
    
        Hour 3-5: Jesus, I never should have joined the Navy
    
        Hour 6: I want to pull out my 9mm and use it on myself
    
        Hours past 6: I am functionally useless
    

Some jobs that aren't knowledge-jobs are hard on your mind, too. The reason
security/watchstanding is so hard is that you have to be alert at all times
while doing, effectively, jack squat. It isn't a much different level of
alertness than I am in while programming, now that I think about it carefully.

------
tptacek
A friend of mine used to check all his code into a private CVS repository and
then trickle his commits out into the official company repository over the
course of a week.

~~~
sheepmullet
I still do this because I don’t have very consistent productivity.

Some sprints I will get 3-4 sprints worth of work done whereas in others I
won’t be able to complete my work.

Since I started smoothing out my performance I have gone from being seen as a
decent dev to a 10x dev.

~~~
aptwebapps
If you have slow patches, you're slow. If you have fast patches, the work must
have been easy, right?

------
leroy_masochist
Makes fairly rational sense -- in addition to the hard deliverables provided
by professional services firms (market studies, fairness opinions, consummated
M&A transactions, etc), their "product" is to a great extent the warm-n-fuzzy
feeling that clients get from the general perception that a bunch of
intelligent, highly educated and broadly competent, insecure overachievers are
burning the midnight oil to triple-check that everything is going to plan and
there are no contingencies left unexamined.

As such, on a meta level, the "product" in this regard is not some kind of
impartial measurable standard of client-related vigilance, but rather,
constant reinforcement of a perception in the client's mind. And so, it's
totally rational that, for example, investment banking associates will always
respond to a late-night email from the client's internal M&A guy or corporate
development lady on the same night the incoming email was sent -- even if it's
an email of the "hey no need to respond to this, just wanted to make sure I
sent you the attachment" variety. Maintaining the perception that someone is
always watching the store is paramount not only in maintaining client
relationships, but also in justifying high fees.

------
ghaff
I'm not sure where the "faking it" comes from. The point seems to be people
who get their job done and don't make a big deal out of structuring their work
arrangements to create more flexibility/fewer hours don't get penalized. Which
squares with my personal experience though obviously doesn't apply everywhere
and isn't something you can always depend on being able to do on an informal
basis.

I find modern communications are a big help in this regard. In past lives,
there often was no real replacement for being literally "by the phone." Though
I still took month-long vacations in those days which some co-workers found
rather hard to comprehend.

------
epx
Two anedoctal stories of mine:

a) I do some consulting for a healthcare company, and bill them by the hour.
It is very difficult to reach 60h/month, I managed to get that once, and it
translated to an incredible amount of work. Initially they were worried about
the cost, and put a cap of 80h/mo, but I never got even near that.

b) Back in the 1990s I worked as technical support for a small ERP company. I
had a colleague that kept a frantic pace the whole day, did a lot of overtime,
always buried by work, complaining, etc. He had so many booked overtime hours,
he took a 3-week vacation solely on them (in Brazil you have 30 day of
vacation per year, as well).

Those 3 weeks were the most quiet I ever saw in my work. I even found the K&R
book and learnt C (I was really amused to find that UNIXes came with a free
compiler. Development tools used to cost several thousand USD back then.)

------
blhack
Can some of you chime in with your experience here re: consulting and hours.

None of the consultants I know of would estimate a time requirement (other
than something incredibly loose) for any kind of job bigger than a few hours.
The MO seems to be some version of:

"You give me [the consulting firm] a maximum per week that you can afford on
this, and we will have a weekly stand up where we talk about what was
completed, what will be completed by next week, and how we can allocate
resources to accomplish these things."

To me this seems like an incredibly good way of managing this relationship.
However, plenty of people I talk to on the other side (trying to hire
consultants) insist that they need a full bid of how much time a project will
take.

I almost always tell these people that I can't really give them that answer,
and that I also to be wary of anybody who actually responds to this question.

Am I the strange one here?

I almost wonder if this is the source of the overage that is being talked
about in this article. They're quoting them $foo hours per week, when in
reality it will take $foo/4\. So when they get the work and finish it at
$foo/2, they don't lose money.

That seems really dishonest to me.

~~~
Denzel
Here's the deal, you need to use both: (1) a bottom-up Agile, and (2) a top-
down estimation approach.

You need to do them at different times and for different reasons. The top-down
estimation at the start of a project needs to be done to the lowest level of
detail necessary to get a Go/No-Go decision made. You can't realistically
start an Agile-managed project without understanding where $10k is in the
ballpark of $10M. That's just foolish. This top-down estimation needs to be
done to the level-of-detail and accuracy required by your Go/No-Go decision.

Then, on a day-over-day basis, you use Agile to manage the actual project
operating process. (I'm speaking loosely here, of course, as long as Agile
makes sense.) This allows you to be dynamic week-over-week and respond to
outside forces, new information, new technology, etc., within your budget.

What people miss is that no sensible project sponsor is going to accept,
"we'll finish it when we finish it for however much it costs" unless it's pure
research. And if I only need accuracy to the closest $10M, then we can keep
the estimates high-level, if I need it to the closest $10k, then we need lower
level estimates. It's just the nature of it. As a project sponsor, I need to
know what's possible.

~~~
Aeolun
Of course, if your high level estimate is 10M, any 10k estimate detail is
bullshit. It would likely be more accurate to give a range from 5M to 20M.

------
raverbashing
In the same spirit of "play stupid games, win stupid prizes", I'll describe
this as "making stupid demands is asking to be deceived"

" For people who were good at faking it, there was no real damage done by
their lighter workloads."

Well, duh. The customer is the limiting factor in a lot of cases and downtime
means you get to focus more on the work (when you're actually working)

------
runj__
I had a big fight with the other co-founders of a company regarding work hours
a while back. Most programmers hit something like up to four "good" hours per
workday, the biggest problem is capturing those hours while they're at work. A
separate problem is hitting those hours while they have access to their
manager or colleagues that can help them overcome small but time consuming
problems.

I'd like to think that programmers have a creative or even artistic occupation
(personally I'm more manager than programmer these days). Forcing something
creative out is rarely good or even possible. The majority of the employees in
my organization are in sales. There's a limit to where you can push that for
most people too, but it is a different kind of limit.

Personally I've only put in proper 80-hour work weeks something like three
times working as a disillusioned startup "employee" or as a consultant in
extreme crunch because of launch marketing costs. Sure, something is deployed
and it you certainly feel a sense of accomplishment but it's not something
that should be used by any serious company expecting people to stay longer
than a year or two.

With that said: people checking/answering their email or checking error logs
at odd hours "for free" really do bring value to a company though.

~~~
ghaff
<With that said: people checking/answering their email or checking error logs
at odd hours "for free" really do bring value to a company though.

I don't think of myself as having trouble with work/personal separation. I
like my vacations, try to enjoy work trips, and don't feel obliged to work
into the night.

That said, I tend to scan my email when on vacation or if I'm watching TV at
night and, if there's something I can deal with in a few minutes or at least
flag as "I'll get back to you next week," why not?

~~~
ryandrake
Why not? Because you’re on vacation! That’s a good enough reason for me.

~~~
ghaff
I don't feel an obligation. But if I can make someone else's life easier with
minimal investment on my part. Why not?

------
horsecaptin
It is possible to do 80 hour workweeks if:

\- The rest of your life is exactly where you want it to be. So, this one
isn't true for 99% of the population.

\- You have the correct mental attitude for it. This isn't true for most of
the population either.

\- You are doing exactly what you want to do in life. The chance that you
could be distracted by another possibility / avenue is next to nil.

None of the above are impossible asks, but they certainly unreasonable. But
some managers like to ask anyway, mostly as a form of leverage. If you're
foolish or desperate enough to fall for it, then well, only fools and
desperate people will give you time week after week to listen to how much you
hate your boss / job.

~~~
bluGill
It is possible for anyone to work a 80 hour week.

However is it worth it? If you are single and getting paid a lot it might be -
with the idea that you save everything and retire early. If you have a social
life at all (including a family) and this is a less than once a year request,
taking one for the team is probably the right thing to do, but only if it
really is a rare thing.

~~~
screye
It is not like you are getting paid more hourly for each extra your put in
right ?

If what you suggest is done, then you are basically selling your youth for
equivalent time with an older body.

It may even be worse, since a 50 year old you may be worth a lot more /hr than
you are now. So it isn't even an equal trade.

I have struggled to understand workoholic mentality for a while. Sure you work
more, but to what end. For what ?

------
Aloha
Does anyone actually accomplish 40 hours of work a week within a 40 hour work
week?

In a typical 40 hour work week, it'd take me 80 hour 'of time at work' to
actually get the 40 hours of actual work, meaning most weeks, I might to 18-25
hours of actual work.

The issue, I think here, is requiring people to go to a place, to do a thing,
for X hours per week - given the ability to be flexible about working hours,
most people will do more, in less time, and be more available for customer
needs.

~~~
gscott
You are working even if what you are doing is an interruption or helping
someone else.

------
baxtr
Don’t be fooled. That third group has also a shitty life. I’ve been there. I
had exactly that life.

It’s not the working hours that take the toll on you but the lifestyle in
general. Just consider this from the article: _“I try to head out by 5, get
home at 5:30, have dinner, play with my daughter,” he said_

Yes, I did that too. You’re dead zombie walking after a couple of weeks
getting up at 4:30am just to be back at 5/6pm to play with the kids, catch up
on mails and calls you’ve missed after the family went to bed until 11/12 or
even 1am just to get up at 4:30am again for the next round

------
wallflower
I remember a story from a BigCo consultant. Many years ago, when he worked
remote and wanted to appear busy, he turned on his oscillating fan and tied a
string to it and then to the wired mouse of his computer so that the 2000-era
“idle” detection (used for chat “presence”) of the computer would not kick in.

------
spiderfarmer
You Americans are messing eachother up with your workaholic culture. Relax
folks, there’s much more to life.

~~~
leroy_masochist
The tens of thousands of highly educated Europeans who voluntarily work in
stressful finance jobs in New York provide an interesting counterpoint to your
argument.

~~~
spiderfarmer
I guess there always will be some masochists.

------
humbleMouse
In the NYT comments someone said

>>"Consulting and Finance are like sports..."

In my experience this is exactly true. Assuming competence in the area you are
consulting - It is most definately a sport of managing expectations more than
doing actual work. Companies expect to be billed for time you spend sitting
around waiting for emails and other things of that nature. More hours "worked"
is not equal to more actual "work".

------
seibelj
I have definitely seen this is various ways. Another outcome of the intense
pressure to deliver hours is when you have a simple phone call with lawyers /
accountants and there are 2 parters, 3 associates, and an assistant taking
notes. Haven’t you guys heard of email?

Oh yes, everyone must be there in person because it’s critical they hear it
directly (so you can bill us $5000 for a 30 minute call).

------
scandox
Of course. In the past. Now. And long into the future.

It's vastly easier to project a convincing illusion than it is to sustain a
reality. Self interested, shrewd people will always put their energy into the
illusion. Illusions give you massive leverage. Reality grinds you down.

And the conscientious and the passionate burn their energies to actually help
the magicians cast their shabby spells.

------
tetha
I think one important takeaway is also: A good, motivated team will make it
work. For example we need to cover 0800 - 1800 due to SLAs, but usually we
have 2 guys just organizing Kita (kindergarten) duty with their wifes. One
brings his kids to the Kita in the morning and comes in at around 0900, and
the other guy comes in early and leaves at 1700ish to collect the kids.
Simple.

We also had this when our application just went into a royal meltdown earlier
this year and we had pretty much constant OOH work to do. Eventually we
arranged that I don't come into the office for a week or more, and I'll just
work reduced night hours. This allowed us to tackle that mayhem much more
effectively - they'd figure out issues and create patches and manual tasks.
I'd apply them overnight, and hand them everything that caught on fire this
time. I don't like to work at night, but I'm the guy without ties and who's
gonna complain about 20 - 25 hour weeks?

------
brycehamrick
'...people, who in her terminology were “passing” as workaholics, received
performance reviews that were as strong as their hyper-ambitious colleagues.'

This is the takeaway from the article. Hours worked != delivered value. One of
many reasons I've always steered consulting engagements towards another
compensation model, e.g. weekly retainer fees.

------
georgewsinger
"You shouldn't work long hours" is consensus advice masquerading as contrarian
advice. You can see this for two reasons: (i) count the number of people in
threads like this who advise against working long hours; (ii) go to Amazon.com
and count the number of books that advocate (often using empirical evidence)
against working long hours. The same is true for "you shouldn't multitask".
Everyone thinks they're clever for saying this. But in fact it's just
consensus advice (and of course: there are good reasons to think it).

The question then is: under what conditions is the consensus opinion wrong?
Why do notable outliers (i.e., people like Elon Musk) do the opposite of
consensus and perform so well (Elon in particular not only consistently works
80+ hour weeks, but seems to multitask quite a bit)?

The interesting data points are always the outliers, not the averages.

~~~
semi-extrinsic
Do we even have well-documented cases of these outliers? Are any unbiased
outsiders allowed to watch what e.g. Musk does in his 80-hour week? How do we
know it's not 40 hours of hard work interleaved with 40 hours of "working"
meals, travelling and other low-productivity time?

~~~
sheepmullet
> other low-productivity time?

How would you even measure low productivity time for someone like Musk who has
incredible leverage?

For example I was chatting with a friebd about his companies product and it
sounds awesome.

Yet for me this was a “low value” conversation as I know I couldnt get my
workplace to purchase it.

Musk on the other hand can delegate the evaluation and if it’s a good fit his
company will buy it.

So for Musk the same conversation could be very high productivity.

~~~
runj__
Musk spending time with his children could be seen as training future C*Os
(I'm not saying this is what he claims to do). Someone reading an business
magazine is business development. Someone reading up on video game development
is educating themselves in the database query issue they're currently
investigating at their workplace.

------
Balgair
There is also the opposite idea: ghosting hours. Where you are actually
working 80 hours, but billing 40. I've had meetings where the bosses of the
consulting firm state that the more junior consultants much be in before the
client, must leave after the client, and much not ghost hours at all. When
they say these things, they really mean that you must ghost hours. A lot of
consulting is learning to read between the lines.

A great show on the topic is House of Lies. Though most consultants won't
claim to have seen everything in the show, they have seen about half.

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

------
cascom
Having worked in one of these businesses - I would have been classified as a
“faker” - but that is the wrong way to interpret it, if you are: inefficient,
can’t prioritize/identify what’s really important, can’t make yourself
available with a cheery attitude after hours/weekends, and can’t manage
expectations, these jobs are killer

If you can, it’s very plausible to work a 55ish hour week (excluding the
occasional hell weeks) with the same if not better work product and great
client and employer satisfaction

------
rustcharm
Original title is:

"How Some Men Fake an 80-Hour Workweek, and Why It Matters"

and the author makes a Big Deal over this being a "man" thing.

Why do the people at "hacker news" want to gloss over the sexism behind the
author's shaky premise? Normally an inflammatory article like this would be
[flagged] and the submitter shadowbanned.

~~~
dang
Because it was an interesting article. When there's an interesting article
with a baity title, we ask submitters to de-bait the title, or (failing that)
do it ourselves. This is in the guidelines:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

------
fludlight
Are SciHub links allowed on HN?

EDIT: Here's the DOI string of the paper referenced:

10.1287/orsc.2015.0975

------
sdfsdfffff
"consultants who quietly lightened their workload did just as well in their
performance reviews as those who were truly working 80 or more hours a week
suggests that in normal times, heavy workloads may be more about signaling
devotion to a firm than really being more productive."

Except that they didn't measure productivity, they measured performance
reviews. Those might not be the same things.

I think it has long been known that if you make a big fuss about your
contributions, you will be noticed more (and maybe even be promoted).
Productivity and perception of productivity might be only weakly correlated.

I don't know if the conclusion should be to fake more, or for managers to
notice more. In any case, would expect the market to take care of it (good
workers aggregating in companies that notice their productivity).

------
kristjansson
N.B. this article is from 2015

------
Nelkins
(2015)

~~~
dang
Added. Thanks!

------
ousta
men and women. parity folks. dont be so misogynist

~~~
withinrafael
The study included women and results differed between the two. Misogyny is not
in play here.

"A second finding is that women, particularly those with young children, were
much more likely to request greater flexibility through more formal means,
such as returning from maternity leave with an explicitly reduced schedule.
Men who requested a paternity leave seemed to be punished come review time,
and so may have felt more need to take time to spend with their families
through those unofficial methods."

[Edit: Unfortunately, a moderator made a similar error and revised the title.
Ah well.

The previous title was: How Some Men Fake an 80-Hour Workweek, and Why It
Matters]

~~~
rustcharm
Hacker News edits the facts, and even titles, to suit their agenda. Sad.

~~~
dang
I don't know how to edit facts, but we edit titles to suit the agenda of
having neutral titles. The article's title was obviously baiting people into
yet another gender flamewar.

This is in the site guidelines:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

