Work Hard, Live Well

https://medium.com/@moskov/work-hard-live-well-ead679cb506d

by sethbannon • 11 years ago

235 160 11 years ago

medium.com

biggio3• 11 years ago

Working hard cannot exist with living well

tempodox2• 11 years ago

I'd refine that to “working too hard...”.

prof_hobart2• 11 years ago

Why not?

biggio3• 11 years ago

Because "hard" here is defined by amount of time required. Living well requires certain amount of time too. So deducing from that we can say that these two cannot coexist. Now, working optimally - not hard - is another story.

MaulingMonkey3• 11 years ago

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.

dasboth2• 11 years ago

I completely agree. I'm a lot more drained on days where I'm jumping between small tasks, getting distracted every few minutes and generally being unproductive than I am after a day of full concentration working on a project.

jo9093• 11 years ago

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.

biggio3• 11 years ago

How old are you?

tempodox2• 11 years ago

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

rsp19843• 11 years ago

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.

bigredtech• 11 years ago

Unless it's actually "your business" and you are a founder, then leaving on Friday after this 80 hour week is ok.

If it's 6pm or 7pm on a Friday and you have worked 80 hours that week, and you need to work more, then you've scheduled something wrong or management has.

And, if you're a founder, who is imparting a culture of leaving to get rest on a Friday evening is not ok, or working 70-80 hour weeks is the norm, then good luck with that culture when people turn resentful.

Respecting yourself and your life and your employees lives while trying to be successful ... that's how it works.

*General "you", not necessarily rsp1984

rsp19843• 11 years ago

I am the founder. When it's Friday afternoon I have worked around 50 to 60 hours. The rest 10-20 hours I do over the weekend.

My employees have regular 40 hour work weeks.

pjmlp5• 11 years ago

80 hours?!

Oh man, I am really glad to live in Europe.

SmellyGeekBoy• 11 years ago

How does that help? Pretty sure the working time regulations - as with most employment laws designed to protect normal employees from exploitation such as minimum wage - don't apply to a business owner working on their own business. That's certainly my experience here in the UK anyway.

roel_v5• 11 years ago

I don't understand this sort of reaction. In Europe, to be successful, you have to work hard and long, too. Please tell me what your definition of 'success' is if you go home after 35 or 40 hours.

jasonkester3• 11 years ago

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.

dasboth2• 11 years ago

I wish it were easier to get this past employers. "Look, I'm more motivated and productive if I work max. 40 hours, preferably 30."

rsp19843• 11 years ago

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.

normloman3• 11 years ago

"That's just not how it works" isn't a reasoned argument. Tell us the real reason why you insist on working yourself to exhaustion despite solid evidence that it makes you less productive.

jazzyk4• 11 years ago

I vehemently disagree with the sub-thread parent above (rsp1984), but it should not be down-voted. There are many people out there who represent this point of view.

Let's not have an echo chamber here.

JD557• 11 years ago

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.

I think the problem here is: Why are people waiting for it? Why can't they wait until Monday?

Usually the reason for this is simple: You scheduled something important (eg. a deploy or a release) to a Friday or a Thursday. If you force yourself to schedule important stuff to Mondays, you'll see things running much more smoothly (even if everything breaks down, you probably have enough time to have it fixed by Wednesday).

thenomad3• 11 years ago

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.

lordnacho5• 11 years ago

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

I think you'd find that you'd get useful ideas for work. I think most of the time spent in software is NOT the bashing the keys to make the code. It's spent thinking about what to write, and spending time going down the wrong path.

I at least have a certain clarity when I'm rested that gives me the solution to last night's problems.

rorykoehler• 11 years ago

I know more than a few people who could do with understanding what you just said.

thenomad3• 11 years ago

Very true.

Incidentally, that feeds into one thing that I found about 20-hour weeks when I tried them: in many ways they're harder than doing an 80-hour week, because you've got to be so disciplined about always doing the most effective thing in the most effective way.

Often that also means going "what's scaring the crap out of me? Right, let's do that", again and again.

sreitshamer• 11 years ago

Being overtired can have 1 positive effect: you get out of your own head and come up with creative solutions that you wouldn't have dreamed up otherwise. Works for me sometimes.

lberger• 11 years ago

Not a positive effect. Creative solutions are one thing, but the best creative solutions come when you are thinking clearly, not overtired and just trying anything.

jazzyk4• 11 years ago

"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."

Yes, it is a stubborn remnant of the industrial era, where the more time was spent producing widgets, the more widgets were produced.

Software is a completely different animal (that's why I love it)

fluidcruft• 11 years ago

It's probably more a consequence of framing compensation as "$/hr". But on the other hand compensation based purely on performance doesn't work well either because it can feel unfair to workers particularly those can't control the input for their output.

[ For example, I've worked with a radiology department where the hospital requires technologists to meet performance metrics based purely on scans/hour or they are sent home early before their shift is complete. This would seem to be more directly performance based, but the problem is that the rest of the hospital fails to do pre-scan screening questionaires correctly and doesn't get patients to the scanners on time. It's extremely demoralizing to the staff and more importantly it leaves very expensive hardware sitting around doing absolutely nothing. And the most talented staff actively avoid doing complex proceedures because they take longer. The "bean counters" somehow don't care about the big picture--expensive hardware is left unused and patient care suffers--hardware purchases and staffing are managed by different administrators and overall things are just... not holistically integrated. Anyway... it's complicated. ]

marbletiles3• 11 years ago

It's not that different. The original research into productivity is from that era, and that's where the 50 hour max came from.

Yes, you can keep making widgets, but you need a new shift of people to do so. That would be an interesting thing for software to explore — a night shift that came in and hacked on your code overnight. Like pair programming, only not.

jkot2• 11 years ago

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.

marbletiles3• 11 years ago

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

jschwartzi• 11 years ago

Ford built tenements for his factory workers so they would live close to work, and he originated some of the research that 50+ hour weeks are damaging to productivity.

piva00• 11 years ago

Define "good conditions", it's a judgement of value, based on subjective perception.

I find it quite hard to work 70 hours/week even if my work is very well organized (my main productivity drain) and I'm working at home, with my own setup in an environment I crafted for being distraction-free and really comfortable.

I can work for at most a week at the pace of 70 hours/week, after that I know I'll really drop my productivity even when I'm liking what I'm doing and truly motivated...

That's my personal experience after my first 9 years in the industry, having worked on open plan offices, team-rooms offices and at home for a couple of years.

paulojreis2• 11 years ago

Someone once said that "the weight of evidence for an extraordinary claim must be proportioned to its strangeness". Where's yours?

rmc2• 11 years ago

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.

lordnacho5• 11 years ago

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.

jasonkester3• 11 years ago

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.

tonyedgecombe• 11 years ago

Win the rat race and you are still a rat, perhaps the race is not worth winning.

rmc2• 11 years ago

Don't play that race. Join a different game. Who cares if that person gets a promotion and more stress? You have a better life.

oulu2006• 11 years ago

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• 11 years ago

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

puranjay• 11 years ago

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

lordnacho5• 11 years ago

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_• 11 years ago

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.

roel_v5• 11 years ago

Yeah because ibanking is an hourly job rollseyes

pjc508• 11 years ago

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.

roymurdock• 11 years ago

It's basically hazing. I doubt many entry-level IBers are in a position to ask their boss for anything, and they work grueling hours (even if it's inefficient) to prove they have the willpower and drive to make it up the ranks in finance. So the IB isn't wasting money, it's actively selecting for the most dedicated/hungry workers.

35h34• 11 years ago

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?

eli_gottlieb• 11 years ago

Basically, speaking first-hand, progress on side projects is dog slow.

rwallace• 11 years ago

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.

FlyingSnake3• 11 years ago

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.

da02• 11 years ago

Any countries or companies in particular?

elros2• 11 years ago

I've been working in Germany for three years now. Can back up OP completely.

anon42• 11 years ago

Any European country. I think Germany is pretty strong on the IT front, together with the UK. In every single country in the EU, you're guaranteed a minimum vacation of 4 weeks, and I think in Germany it's a minimum of 6 weeks.

Just DO NOT work for game studios. The lesson I learned from friends who lived that life is NEVER EVER, unless you're in charge and have enough capital to burn on a creative venture. In that branch people do work for 48 hours, sleep at the office and generally run on constant crunch time to ship at a specific date.

FlyingSnake3• 11 years ago

Germany, NL, Nordic Countries, Poland and CZ are pretty relaxed about work.

switch0072• 11 years ago

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• 11 years ago

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

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

paulojreis2• 11 years ago

Nor Portugal, nor Spain...

scott_karana• 11 years ago

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

Half the time, the UK pretends it's not part of Europe, and the other half of the time, complains for not being included.

I think we both knew that GP meant "continental Europe". ;)

FlyingSnake3• 11 years ago

Let me guess: you didn't move to the UK?

Germany. But I've heard from friends and family in NL, Spain and PT that it's similar laid back attitudes in those countries too. No idea about UK, but I've heard they've ~25 vacation days too.

hwstar• 11 years ago

US companies have shown they can't police themselves on this matter. We should write our US Representatives and strongly suggest that the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 be reformed and be harmonized with the European Working Time Directive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_Time_Directive

hengheng• 11 years ago

German here, working in an emerging start-up where every day is full of surprises, as to be expected (positive as well as negative). I do 40 hours, and it keeps me sane, creative, thorough and relaxed.

Bostonian• 11 years ago

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."

papapra2• 11 years ago

But if you take in account the statistics of how many start-ups succeed, that's not a great deal...

pjc508• 11 years ago

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

normloman3• 11 years ago

How many YC start ups are so successful that the founders can retire after 4 years? Hardly any. PGs trying to dupe us.

npizzolato• 11 years ago

PG's incentives aren't aligned with those of a single founder. He can spout that nonsense advice because he invests in hundreds of companies. So he can give advice that will lead to the majority of companies working ridiculous hours and burning out, but if even one of them defy the odds and become a "unicorn", he makes money. You, as a founder, only have stake in a single company, not hundreds, so you should do things to make your company succeed.

AndrewKemendo17• 11 years ago

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.

georgefrick3• 11 years ago

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_v5• 11 years ago

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.

AndrewKemendo17• 11 years ago

You are assuming a 5-6 day work week. It's closer to 12-14 hours a day everyday.

I am also not writing code - which I think people just assume is the case. My role as founder is super varied, so in any given day I will do a meeting or two with investors, calls with the CTO, hangout meetings, design sessions, "brainstorming" or whatever you want to call a creative process, recruiting, reading industry news, reviewing financial statements, calls with customers, customer support emails, building presentations etc... I spread this out from about 830 AM to 1 AM with most of the work from 830AM - 5PM Break for dinner and family time from 5 - 830/9 then do some of the lighter work again from 9PM - 1 AM.

That works for me and my family. I have worked in much more stressful environments and can tell you for a fact that there is no dip in productivity - if anything, working less makes me antsy.

papapra2• 11 years ago

I think the chart about perceived productivity is for you :)

AndrewKemendo17• 11 years ago

Ha, maybe but doubtful. I have been in those situations where it is very clear that productivity has dropped but people are still working and I can tell you that they make me mad. I hate wasting time, so that's really what drives my work - that my time is best used when put to something creative/productive rather than un-engaging.

ryandrake5• 11 years ago

Your definition of success is narrow. Many companies in many industries (operating at all kinds of risk/reward levels) deliver returns that satisfy their shareholder(s). Most of them are home to traditional 9-5 jobs.

AndrewKemendo17• 11 years ago

Let's be clear here though. We aren't talking about any outcome companies. This whole thing started with the article about Amazon, which is not a company looking for an average outcome they are trying to dominate the world of marketplaces.

No company that is trying to do massive huge game changing things are 9-5. That also counts for big projects (Apollo, Manhattan etc...) that have out-sized goals.

bildung2• 11 years ago

1. Can anyone name a company on par with Amazon/Uber/SpaceX/Goog etc... where everyone is working 9-5?

In terms of revenue? Volkswagen had a revenue of about EUR 200 billion in 2014. In Germany (where 200.000 of Volkswagens employees work), working hours are 32 hours at Volkswagen proper, and up to 40 hours at Audi, Porsche etc.

And Volkswagen is a profitable company (in contrast to Uber and Amazon...).

epalmer2• 11 years ago

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.

x0rg• 11 years ago

I did something similar, the worst part is that my employer never understood how crazy it was to work 70 hrs/week. Really, I tried very hard and with a lot of honesty to explain it, but I couldn't stop this.

epalmer2• 11 years ago

So sad when the boss does not get it and others seem to think they need to model the bosses behavior.

My boss is retiring on June and she has no outside interests. No golf, no card playing, no anything. She works 70+ hours and has for years and claims she loves her job. I think as the daughter of a 3 star army general, she loves being responsible. She sets a bad example for balance and I think her love for work is more a fear or what is beyond work for her. I'm 2 to 4 years away from retiring and I have a lot of interests (maker, mentor of k12, concerts, travel, learning to draw...). I love what I do but I love the weekend more.

jazzyb• 11 years ago

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• 11 years ago

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.

mellavora2• 11 years ago

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.

anon42• 11 years ago

This article is specifically about work performed for others in order to secure capital so you can pay rent and buy food. If you work for yourself, it's not really work. It's your life. Most people have to sell part of their life in order to have the rest of it. Your experience is one shared by only a privileged few and I'd appreciate it if you stayed out of this discussion. The life you've had has left you utterly incapable of comprehending the issue.

AndrewKemendo17• 11 years ago

This article is specifically about work performed for others in order to secure capital so you can pay rent and buy food

How do you figure? Dustin was a FB Founder and is saying he would have been more effective with less hours. He, and the examples he cites in the article, are literally the best examples of "privileged few."

mellavora2• 11 years ago

Dear friend,

I certain understand the pain and frustration you feel. In my 20s I spent some 6 months homeless. I've begged for money for food. It was a long and very painful road up from there. Many bullshit jobs. I would not have made it without some help.

When you live at the margins of society, you learn some things about societal constructs such as "work." The distinction between the "part you sell" and the part you do not sell is not so distinct.

AndrewKemendo17• 11 years ago

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.

saiya-jin2• 11 years ago

... and if you look around, those 2 names ring many bells from people who felt treated horribly working for those guys, vastly more compared to... any other big name. there is no one-template-fits-all, we are all vastly different beings inside.

you can try to aim same type of people like yourself for hiring, but after few headcounts this gets really hard. you either provide extra cash motivation, or promise (and delivery) to work on something amazing.

ryandrake5• 11 years ago

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.

normloman3• 11 years ago

The difference between reading a novel and writing a business plan is that you have to write the business plan. That makes a huge difference.

pjc508• 11 years ago

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• 11 years ago

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 :-)

SuperGent• 11 years ago

18 months pay in one hit must have been nice!

pjc508• 11 years ago

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.

jofer2• 11 years ago

Getting past falsifying of timesheets is _very_ difficult. It's the norm rather than the exception, at least in my experience.

When I used to sling burgers, etc, my employers would regularly retroactively clock me out for breaks I wasn't allowed to take. We were clocked out when our shifts were supposed to have ended, regardless of when we were allowed to leave.

It was normal to work 10-12 hours and get paid for 7 (at $4.75 & $5.15, none-the-less). If you report it, you're fired and blacklisted.

While I was under 18, I would be clocked out at 11pm on any school weeknight (state law). The catch was that I was on closing shift, so I couldn't leave (locked doors) until we were through -- usually ~1am. 2 hours per-night unpaid, plus a 30 minute deduction from my pay for a break I was never allowed to take.

All of that is illegal under a variety of state and federal laws. However, enforcement of those laws is either non-existent or is a tiny slap on the wrist ($500 fine for stealing an aggregate of ~$10,000 in wages over a year in the case of one place I worked at that was finally caught).

I'm getting on a tangent, but my main point is unpaid extra work is rampant among hourly employees as well as salaried.

I completely agree with your premise, but I think we'd see the same problems come up in a different form. Fixing that problem requires putting at least some bargaining power back in the hands of employees, and that's difficult in most places.

pjc508• 11 years ago

unpaid extra work is rampant among hourly employees as well as salaried

Yeah. It's the other kind of "black" economy, where profit relies on defrauding the employees because they have no power. The people doing it probably tell themselves and their friends that they're making money through hard work and the virtue of long hours.

Lawtonfogle• 11 years ago

Instead they should throw the manager in prison for a good decade or so, like any normal person would be treated if they stole that much. If people were treated like corporations, the worst crimes imaginable would have prices under $100 for each time you were caught.

jo9093• 11 years ago

One of the important and unintuitive points is that this is exactly NOT true.

The extra hours are NOT free to the company.

Ok they don't pay for them in money, but also don't gain anything in additional work being done. In the extreme case they loose productivity, people get sick, people quit etc, which is a very real cost for the company.

transfire• 11 years ago

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.

thewarrior• 11 years ago

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.

jxm262• 11 years ago

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.

jdjxjxxns• 11 years ago

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.

melindajb• 11 years ago

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.

Work Hard, Live Well

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