Why Crunch Mode Doesn't Work

http://www.igda.org/why-crunch-modes-doesnt-work-six-lessons

by kamaal • 14 years ago

130 91 14 years ago

It's interesting that, after all the productivity gains in the last century, we are still worried about maximizing output, all while putting two adults to work in each household.

sliverstorm• 14 years ago

Why would it be surprising? Individuals tend to want to maximize their income to improve their situation, even if most other people think they are making "enough".

_delirium• 14 years ago

There are significant constraints on people's ability to choose. Many people, particularly in the upper-middle-class, would choose lower income for lower hours if it were an option. Of course, many others wouldn't. But if it were common for large companies to offer, say, a choice of working a standard workweek for regular pay, or a 32-hour workweek with every Friday off for lower pay, quite a few people would take the 4-day-week option.

Joeri• 14 years ago

The productivity gains have happened _because_ people were obsessed with increasing output. What's even more interesting is that we've had to adopt a consumer culture to keep the economy rolling in the face of an excess of supply. Marketing is an entire field of pseudoscience devoted to increasing demand to meet an artifically inflated supply.

Even the web is funded largely by advertising, marketing. Could it exist if we in the west had a classical eastern philosophy of not desiring more than we needed? Given that china invented practically everything, but got "nowhere" doing it until they adopted consumer culture, i suspect that the web wouldn't have happened.

eli_gottlieb5• 14 years ago

Admittedly, China didn't "go nowhere". Late Medieval China had living conditions better than any the pre-industrial and industrial West managed, while working less than the post-industrial West does today. Only the onset of social democracy and post-industrialization drove living standards up to what the Chinese enjoyed for ages.

Admittedly, they mostly managed this because large portions of their land area could naturally support plenty of people without too much work put into agriculture.

critium6• 14 years ago

In my manager past, the times i've asked for crunch mode are few and far in between, and I always put a carrot at the end, depending on the severity of the crunch. Anywhere from a nice lunch at a fancy restaurant, to a few days off. I've even dangled a team building movie matinee. I've never found cash to be a real big motivator.

My 2 simple rules for crunch mode:

1. Manager better be there. Me personally, i would dive in and actually start doing code reviews. But even if I had absolutely nothing to add, I had to be there to show support. Even for window dressing. You call for crunch mode, you better be present. Even if its just to buy lunch or starbucks for the devs.

2. Coding is like breathing. Crunch mode inhale must be followed by re-tooling, decompressing exhale. You can only inhale so much.

hythloday2• 14 years ago

I'm pretty sure you've never managed me, so don't take this as a personal attack, but nothing makes me more disgruntled than the management announcing that a month of overtime (estimated market cost to me: more than £1500) will be followed by a nice lunch at a fancy restaurant (estimated market cost to the company: less than £50). The two are not remotely comparable, and to think of it as a carrot (or worse, a quid pro quo) when in fact it's much closer to a thank-you for a favour is infuriating.

Your two rules are...minimally adequate, I guess. They're certainly nothing to pat yourself on the back about.

critium6• 14 years ago

If the cash carrot works for you, then great. On the converse side, one of the main things i look for when building teams, above developer skill is craft and commitment. I try to say away from gunslingers as much as possible.

Which is why I can get away with my minimally adequate rules as you've put it. I certainly dont pat myself in the back about my rules. Its all about sharing the pain. I also forgot my 3rd rule. Only developers set deadlines so I can ask them to commit to it. If we have a date to hit, then we work on scope.

nostrademons4• 14 years ago

The experiments cited in this paper are largely from the manufacturing age, where workers were doing largely mindless work on an assembly line. I'd imagine that for today's highly-trained, heavily knowledge-oriented creative class, the optimum workweek is roughly 25-30 hours. That seems to square with the amount of actual productive coding time I got when working on my startup, with the data RescueTime got on actual coding time for their YC class, and with conversations I've had with friends in Ph.D programs.

It's probably possible to squeeze another couple hours of mindless work in there (eg. checking e-mail, triaging bugs, meetings) to round out an 8-hour day. But if you're interested in getting the maximum coding output on hard, creative programming problems, 40 hours is way too much.

dinkumthinkum• 14 years ago

25-30 quality hours of coding, I would say is not an unreasonable view. I don't have data for you but I wouldn't be surprised if this was true.

kamaal9• 14 years ago

>>The experiments cited in this paper are largely from the manufacturing age, where workers were doing largely mindless work on an assembly line.

What do you think herds of corporate Java/C# programmers do with their auto complete/intellisense laden IDE's? That is nothing short of coding equivalent of assembly line work.

>> I'd imagine that for today's highly-trained, heavily knowledge-oriented creative class, the optimum workweek is roughly 25-30 hours.

People who fit into that description probably account for a very miniscule minority in the programming world today.

eli_gottlieb5• 14 years ago

I actually agree, at least partially.

When I was young and in larval stage, I would work very, very long hours on my hobby projects. Today, I think of myself as having a programmer's virtues of laziness, impatience, and hubris, I despise all-nighters (even for hobby projects), and I place a lot of value on leisure activities and time with friends and family. My passions have changed, even though I like having the time to work on my hobby and business projects (I've got two at the moment).

But then again, my skill level has increased far more than my desired work hours have decreased. When I started, I could barely use the Delphi graphical debugger, often dealt with null pointer errors from bad object-destruction or initialization practices, crashed my machine from copying data to the wrong location in memory half the time, reinvented the wheel most of the time, knew no math above high-school level (I was in middle school, after all!), knew only three similar imperative programming languages (QBasic, Delphi, and C++), and only knew how to use Windows ME. "Version control" was not even in my personal vocabulary, and I only knew the build system that came with my IDE.

Today, I know more programming languages than I can remember to list, I run all three major desktop OS's and program for them when desirable and necessary, I know enough calculus and linear algebra to make my way as a computer scientist and real programmer, either use garbage collection or practice strong memory discipline, almost never follow bad pointers, and do most of my debugging with System.err.println and command-line debuggers. I have used git, Mercurial, Subversion, and CVS, the former two professionally, and I've had the misfortune to use not only CMake, ant, SBT, and Python install/packaging scripts for build systems but autotools and manually-written Makefiles as well.

My desired hours of work have shrunk linearly, but my skill, knowledge-base, and sheer experience have grown polynomially if not exponentially. I don't just hit things with sticks anymore, I know where to hit things with sticks. Just who the hell does the world think I am?

But all that said, many employers most likely deal with a lot of larval-stage college grads and amateurs who remain unproductive enough to require long working hours well into their careers. There's also a gigantic signaling issue here, because not even 10 or 15 years in the field actually indicates that you're this kind of experienced, intuitive, get-it-done-quick-and-slope-off-down-the-pub hacker, nor that you're an "A player" for any specific field of problem.

So if I'm a hiring manager who wants to run a company full of lazy people (that is, "lazy" in the sense of short hours or even a reduced workweek), how do I find the programmers with the sheer skill to not require late-night debugging binges at least occasionally?

stcredzero4• 14 years ago

> What do you think herds of corporate Java/C# programmers do with their auto complete/intellisense laden IDE's? That is nothing short of coding equivalent of assembly line work.

I'm sorry, but I need to ask you where you're getting your data from. There are some pretty dim coders out there who are mightily impressed with their ability to be a code monkey, despite the mindless nature of what they do. That's not what the majority of coders I've met are like, and I've spent over a decade in corporate environments. (Smalltalk shops may be atypical.)

btilly3• 14 years ago

What do you think herds of corporate Java/C# programmers do with their auto complete/intellisense laden IDE's? That is nothing short of coding equivalent of assembly line work.

Do you actually know what assembly line work is?

You have power screw driver, an endless line of doors coming towards you, and an endless supply of screws also coming towards you. Pick up screw, place in hole, push on it with your screw driver. Repeat. There is no variation, only endless repetition.

It is a little known fact that the assembly line was originally inspired by a disassembly line. Specifically disassembling dead animals from whole bodies to specific cuts of meat in a meatpacker's plant. The body is coming towards you, whack off the leg, toss in that basket over there. Repeat.

The fact that different popups have different associated messages makes even the most routine coding infinitely more varied than an assembly line.

Try this. Spend an hour typing out:

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. ...

That will give you a taste of how boring an assembly line is. (But not really, the task you're being asked to do there is more complex than the repetitive task than what an assembly line worker in Ford's day would be asked to do. Unless, of course, you cut and paste instead of typing.)

kamaal9• 14 years ago

Productivity has various shades and maximizing productivity of a corporate slave is difficult.

What I have observed is people sprint only under to two situations- first when a lion is behind them or when they are chasing a gold treasure. Expecting people to sprint all the time doing work as normal without any gains or losses doesn't get winners in any situations.

In my experience my work day is generally divided into three sets of tasks. Periods which I spend firefighting, providing support to some urgent issue, providing information, routine chores, fixing bugs, adding features. The most productive periods of my work involve doing new stuff. The most unproductive and boring stuff involves manual testing, writing test cases and documentation.

So if you see it- money, fear of getting fired and interesting work form the biggest motivating factors in my daily productivity efforts. I never understood CEO/VP/Manager BS talk of expecting people to remain ridiculously productive regardless of rewards and quality of work. Especially when they themselves don't follow that advice. No manager/CEO/VP I've every met wants to work in a non growth area of work. They never want to touch anything that is not rewarding to their very own careers. Yet they expect their reports to the very thing they would never do.

Other wise personal productivity wise, my day breaks up into three parts 8:00-12:00, 13:00-17:00, 20:00-00:00. I skip the last part sometimes. Another thing that I've learned about productivity is to know how to tackle inevitable distraction. How not to get overwhelmed by tasks at hand, How to use GTD efficiently and learn to work from one session to another.

drewinglis• 14 years ago

When you work more than 40 hours per week, you're borrowing time from your future self. However, the interest rates are very high, and so usually it doesn't make sense to borrow this time.

trustfundbaby• 14 years ago

This is so so true ... I've been doing 4.5-5.5 hour nights (sleep) for years and very recently have started to see the effects in aging ... greying and balding at a much earlier age than I anticipated (for example). I've made my peace with it now, but I can't help but wonder how much I would have cheated aging if I had been sleeping 7/8 hours a night instead.

More scary is how much of the detrimental effect of lack of sleep I am yet to encounter.

rwallace• 14 years ago

You have started sleeping 8 hours a night now, right?

rhizome• 14 years ago

This reminds me of Jerry Seinfeld's "Night Guy & Morning Guy" bit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-Cz-LK16g4

xianshou• 14 years ago

Useful output depends highly upon the nature of the work and how well-rested you are. I find myself capable of at most 4 hours of high-intensity programming per day, but easily capable of 10 hours of routine work. However, if I don't get at least 7 hours of sleep per night, I'm useless for most everything.

Commenting on the statistics themselves, though, I would very much like to see the data on working time disambiguated from the data on sleep. Perhaps the negative correlation between working hours and productivity stems from their mutual relation to sleep: it is not only possible, but probable that sleep declines about linearly with hours worked. I would argue that the difference in sleep is likely to make a far larger difference for the majority than the difference in the length of the workweek.

fchollet• 14 years ago

Before arbitrarily drawing conclusions about software development, it would be necessary to actually run proper studies in this industry. It is simply not rational, or scientific, to apply the results of manufacturing-related studies to software development, when the nature of the work and the cognitive bottlenecks are completely different.

Based on anecdotal evidence, I would postulate that the average optimal workweek length for intellectual (and part-creative) work is significantly shorter than 40 hours (30 hours?), and probably varies wildly among individuals (while the optimal manufacturing workweek length is very stable over different individuals).

btilly3• 14 years ago

It should be noted that what is needed for assembly line productivity is different than what is needed for complex cognitive tasks. The more demanding the cognitive task, the more important sleep and relaxation are. That is why in Steve McConnell's classic Rapid Development he advocates a 35 hour week.

And the real limit for a lot of people may be less. For instance read http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/05/18/kalzumeus-podcast-ep-2-w... to find out that patio11 thinks that he can only be productive 2-4 hours per day. This is a man who started a business on the side while working the insane hours of a Japanese salaryman. It isn't that he can't put in the hours, it is what he can do and be productive.

Greatly complicating all of this is are two simple facts. The first is that we can push ourselves and be productive for a short period, so over a couple of weeks we really can work insane hours and be productive. The second is that we have coping mechanisms to hide our own inability from us - so as our ability to function disappears down the drain, it is very hard for us to judge how impaired we are.

To that end, there was an interesting piece of research that I read about many years ago. The military was conducting research on sleep deprivation. One of their findings was that soldiers can be trained to operate on 6 hours of sleep, and will self-report that that they are functioning well and getting more done than they could if they slept longer. However the wives of those soldiers disagreed. And when ability to perform was judged on standard ability tests, the wives were right.

If you, personally, work long hours and consistently get little sleep, there is some food for thought. Could you be getting more done if you took care of yourself and put in more reasonable hours?

kamaal9• 14 years ago

>>It should be noted that what is needed for assembly line productivity is different than what is needed for complex cognitive tasks.

Not actually. Assembly line work might be less intellectually appealing to us, but for a lot of people it is a complex cognitive task. If you were to talk to a every day assembly worker of an iPhone, he would find assembling complex circuitry pretty intellectually challenging.

Things become less intellectually challenging as your brain gets seasoned to it. Even coding for that matter these days has become pretty less intellectually challenging. Growth of modern day IDE's have rendered many programmers into kind of code assembly workers, autocomplete/intellisense does most of thinking these days.

>> The more demanding the cognitive task, the more important sleep and relaxation are.

My dad is a cab driver and he used to drive trucks before. I can tell you this is not true. You can easily argue driving is a repetitive task once learned. But you have no clue how tiring it becomes. In general a hobby is enjoyable, but any thing taken up full time as a profession is tiring.

In the book Flow by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, he explains how once you get into Flow enough number of times, any job becomes boring and you have to keep moving higher up the ladder of difficult tasks to experience Flow again.

So its not that we programmers do jobs which are the center of the universe. What is true for others is generally true for us too.

stcredzero4• 14 years ago

> Growth of modern day IDE's have rendered many programmers into kind of code assembly workers, autocomplete/intellisense does most of thinking these days.

Please tell me that there is irony involved in this quote. Otherwise the term "thinking" has been diluted to the point of existential crisis. What IDEs do is remembering and accounting. That's cognitive activity, but it's not something that involves sentience or thoughtfulness.

What separates the best programmers from the herd is thinking, and it's not embodied in an IDE.

mweibel2• 14 years ago

> Things become less intellectually challenging as your brain gets seasoned to it.

That's obviously true.

>Even coding for that matter these days has become pretty less intellectually challenging. Growth of modern day IDE's have rendered many programmers into kind of code assembly workers, autocomplete/intellisense does most of thinking these days.

I don't think this is true. Of course IDEs made certain things easier like looking up class/method/function names and their documentation but imho that's not the hardest part about programming.

Besides that I agree with you. You can't make a general statement about what is tiring for someone. I think working as a craftsman is as tiring as working as a programmer - it's just different. A craftsman's body will be tired and a programmer's brain will be tired.

btilly3• 14 years ago

Are you saying that the assembly line work that Ford studied was a complex cognitive task? Not according to the people who did it - in fact a major reason cited for quitting was that the work was so boring!

Luckily that type of work has been pretty much replaced by robots today.

Assembly line work is exhausting - very exhausting. However you can continue to do it while your brain is shot. This contrasts with programming where you simply usefully can't work on many problems unless you're in good enough shape to keep the necessary state in your head.

And an incidental note about your dad. Driving involves a lot of complex visual recognition and situational awareness of a constantly changing environment. We do not think of this as a complex cognitive task because we're wired to do it without even being aware of doing so. But when you look on a brain scan, huge parts of your brain light up and are working. This is real mental effort being made, and it is no surprise that you get tired after constantly doing it for long enough.

glenra• 14 years ago

> Assembly line work might be less intellectually appealing to us, but for a lot of people it is a complex cognitive task. If you were to talk to a every day assembly worker of an iPhone, he would find assembling complex circuitry pretty intellectually challenging.

I doubt that. The way you make an assembly line efficient is by breaking down complex tasks into super-simple subtasks. Each person does one tiny thing, and does it over and over until the actions are automatic - you could practically do it in your sleep. If any task requires "intellectual challenge", you're doing something wrong; that is a bug in your assembly process that you should fix if you want a highly reliable, replicable result.

wslh• 14 years ago

> It should be noted that what is needed for assembly line productivity is different than what is needed for complex cognitive tasks. The more demanding the cognitive task, the more important sleep and relaxation are. That is why in Steve McConnell's classic Rapid Development he advocates a 35 hour week.

In my personal experience this is 100% right. But the reason could be the level of pressure and the anxiety involved.

On manual jobs I can work more than 8 hours a day with a good productivity and without feeling tired. In software development I can't. Probably this depends on the pressure. If you are in a manual jobs with higher productivity pressure (like assemble <n> units a day where the average is less than that) will have a similar effect.

Also I find a difference between people who have an expertise in a more specific software development field (SQL databases) than on people who jump to different problems/languages/technologies in different computer fields all the time. You can maintain your productivity if you narrowed your areas of expertise.

pasbesoin• 14 years ago

I'll add to your comment just my observation of the necessity for good health. Some injuries without ready solutions disrupted my focus to the point where I simply couldn't perform at my prior level, no matter how much raw effort, willpower, caffeine, etc. I attempted.

Guard your health!

SatvikBeri• 14 years ago

The article mentions a very similar result:

"In a study on the effects of sleep deprivation, investigators at the University of Pennsylvania found that subjects who slept four to six hours a night for fourteen consecutive nights showed significant deficits in cognitive performance equivalent to going without sleep for up to three days in a row. Yet these subjects reported feeling only slightly sleepy and were unaware of how impaired they were."

electrograv• 14 years ago

For me the magic factor to maximize productivity is sleep.

I have worked consistent 70 hour weeks, where most of those hours are in sprint high-productivity coding mode, AND without getting burnt out or tired. The secret is simple: I was getting 9-10 hours of solid sleep every night.

Sadly it's far too easy to stay up late at night browsing the web, losing sleep for no good reason in particular.

eli_gottlieb5• 14 years ago

And yet I see job ads for software developers listing 40-hour workweeks alongside the sweet perks like equity or company lunches.

Firms really just don't get that the productivity studies were all done decades ago, and mostly came to one conclusion: 8 hours/day, 5 days/week.

pg2• 14 years ago

I wonder if one thing that distinguishes successful startup founders is that they are immune to some force that limits the amount of productive work that other people can do.

Of course everyone has a point where working another hour is not a good deal. But if that varies from person to person as much as other things do, it would be very convenient for a startup founder to be a couple standard deviations above the mean.

mweibel2• 14 years ago

Of course a certain excitement can help doing more productive hours a day for a couple of weeks/months but I don't think this holds on for a longer time.

As a software engineer I exactly notice the things the article mentions. After 6-7 hours I'm getting tired and after 8 hours it becomes really hard to concentrate.

stcredzero4• 14 years ago

i'm curious: do you think you are or have been an outlier? I've had the occasional 16 hour stint on something I'm excited about, but this isn't the common case for me. 4-6 hours a day is what I produce in optimum ordinary conditions nowadays.

lbarrow• 14 years ago

One possibility is that for a startup founder, there usually is a great variety of work.

One hour you could be writing code, the next answering a support email, the next pitching a prospective customer, and so on. It could be that by switching gears every few hours, people are able to retain some of their productivity.

patio11• 14 years ago

Context switching is, in the literature, known to be productivity destroying, and while it may feel like a very productive day if I do things from four categories, I can tell you that when I actually go back and look at the results it is feelings-nothing-more-than-feelings.

e.g. If I were doing nothing but customer contact mode, I know that I can send 50 emails in a day of moderate complexity. (e.g. Consulting mini-proposal for a client, support issue for BCC customer, pre-sales question for AR, ... x50. I know this because I have verifiably done it on e.g. launch days before.)

I did four things today -- video recording, hopped on a call, sent emails, and... shoot, only three things but I thought I remembered four. My subjective experience is that 1/3rd of my day was email. How many emails did I send? 1/3 * 50 = ~15? No. Five. And it (subjectively) felt like pulling teeth even though three of those were the same email with a few hand-written edits in the middle of them, whereas after I get into email flow mode for I can normally do two hours without getting bored.

I've got at least two hours into working with video today. How many 5 minute videos have I completed? Umm, zero.

Contrast this with yesterday: yesterday I putzed around to 6 PM and then coded until 10 PM then quit for dinner. I got two features coded and tested then squashed a pair of bugs. Yesterday feels non-productive in some ineffable way ("I putzed around until 6 PM! I only worked 4 hours and my salaryman brain rebels against the sheer laxity! All I did was code six measly little commits!") but it almost certainly added more to the business.

aidenn0• 14 years ago

In that case, my Dad should have founded a startup; he seems to be able to work 60 hour weeks indefinitely.

chubot5• 14 years ago

That was what I observed when working at EA (I was actually part of the EA Spouse settlement so this kind of comes home).

Probably 10-20% of the people on the dev team just loved it. They couldn't get enough. That includes engineers and artists. They could work from 9am to 11pm for months.

But then management expects 100% of people to be like that. And there's peer pressure not to let down your coworkers. But in reality some people just have more stamina, and can get more done with the incremental hour, while for others it was just clocking time and being a zombie.

I definitely couldn't get much more done in all those late nights, although it in part it has to do with the fact that there was some sort of "schedule". If you know that you can take a day or 2 off whenever you want, you're likely to have more stamina for a 16 hour bender.

Anyway, there is so much human variation in other things; it doesn't surprise me at all that it's true for how many hours you can productively work in a day. I would bet startup founders need that stamina, although I'm sure there are many more components to success.

critium6• 14 years ago

I think the main difference is engagement vs grinding. Take gaming for example. How many hours can you sink into that? My personal experience was that I could go pretty hard at it with very little sleep (I know, i know) and still be quite effective. I get the same way when im hacking away at something i love. Right now, im trying to put together a JS debugger for vim. Its 3am here and I can just keep on going.

Now, the same cant be said about writing TPS reports.

kamaal9• 14 years ago

>>But then management expects 100% of people to be like that.

All management that I've seen dislikes people with 'distinction', 'rock stars', 'mavericks'... The reason is they make rewards inevitable.

The cult of management likes to believe in comparative rewarding. Its believed if all are same, no one deserves a reward.

Besides I've met a few managers who mark awesome performances as just 'meets expectations' because they expected you to be awesome and you were just that. So no reward for you.

Management survives on averaging and normalizing people efforts to minimize giving away of rewards.

georgemcbay• 14 years ago

"That includes engineers and artists. They could work from 9am to 11pm for months."

My experience through various sectors of the software industry (including gaming) is that virtually nobody really works 9 am to 11pm for months. But some people are happy being at the office from 9 am to 11 pm assuming the "work day" includes a multi-hour team lunch break, some random breaks for playing Doom II, Diablo 3 or the newest Battlefield or whatever is hot at the office, lots of slashdotting/redditing/HNing/etc, hours long discussions about what happened on the hot geeky tv show, etc. So what it comes down to isn't even the workaholics vs the non-workaholics, but the totally tech-focused geeks vs the people who have non-tech things going on in their lives.

FWIW, up until my early-mid 30s I was very much the former, so I don't entirely begrudge that lifestyle, but I think it is mostly fantasy that those people are putting in significantly more actual work hours than the other group. Personally, I know I'm vastly more productive putting in 8-ish hours day now than I ever was when I was putting in 16-ish hour "work" days, though everyone's mileage may vary.

afterburner• 14 years ago

"They could work from 9am to 11pm for months."

But how long did they keep this up for? Months-long crunch times popping up for, what, 5 years? Or did they keep this up for 10, 20 years? Burnout and health effects can take years to show up.

I suspect those that do this and keep up the pace move on to more organizational work later on, which isn't the same thing.

aheilbut• 14 years ago

Whether it's purely emotional or a subconscious economic calculation, there's a big difference between work on something that you own and care about and work done because it's your job.

ctl• 14 years ago

That could be the case; but it's also certainly possible that many or most successful founders are not much different from normal people in their ability to effectively work long hours. (And my personal intuition is that this second possibility is more likely than your theory.)

Incidentally: in your essays (which I enjoy), you often imply that founders should work long hours. If founders working long hours actually decreases the likelihood of a startup succeeding, then you've been giving bad advice for many years now. (And I'm sure that people have been taking it.) That's something that you should think seriously about.

netcan• 14 years ago

That's an interesting question. people obviously vary greatly in how much work they can get done in all sorts of ways. How much they can get done in an hour, how many hours they can do. They also vary within individuals in depending on circumstances, mood and seemingly unrelated things. I know someone who became extremely productive for a time after exiting a relationship.

I think everyone has experienced extreme bursts of productivity at some point where they think "If I could keep this up: I could work just 3 months a year / complete a degree in 6 months / build this thing in a 3 weeks." The differences between average and awesome, for the same person, are huge.

My guess is that the people who can consistently keep their productivity at the far end of the spectrum are there because of a combination factors, but I am really just guessing.

bermanoid• 14 years ago

You mention this as if you don't already have more than enough data to tell us whether it's true or not.

Is it?

When you run a spreadsheet and scatter plot hours worked over the first few months against your ROI on startups, do you see a meaningful correlation?

I say "first few months" because once a startup is successful, the founders are almost always going to put in more hours than those that languish in obscurity.

ricardobeat• 14 years ago

I felt a strong urge to downvote this. It sounds like a paternalistic excuse to dismiss the whole article, but then...

Isn't it the case that they can do more in the same amount of time, not work longer? Either way it's a net win, but I don't think you need superpowers to be successful.

mattmanser• 14 years ago

This is exactly the attitude everyone is challenging.

This is the superman myth, it doesn't exist.

If Bob, our intrepid entrepreneur, actually worked 40 hours a week he wouldn't spend so much time faffing. The 'busy work' disappears. Overall productivity drops the more you work long hours.

I've nowhere near your experience with entrepreneurs, I totally admit, but one of the symptoms I've noticed in crunch entrepreneurs is their mental diarrhoea, they take 15-20 minutes rambling on talking to you about a decision you've asked for that they normally would have made in a minute or 2. You start walking away and then suddenly they have another point/thought. They're mentally exhausted. I can reflect back on myself and see the same thing when I was doing crazy hours.

Some of these people have succeeded, some haven't.

But the person them self doesn't notice. They still think they are operating at high productivity.

sageikosa• 14 years ago

At a certain point (or at multiple points during a suitable long stretch), enduring the long hours becomes a top priority for an individual actor in an attempt to avoid the "slow-down". The actor may decide to switch to a task that they can more easily handle so as to remain "productive", but this switch is not necessarily to the most important task to complete the enterprise goal; or may be a "refresh task" which does not directly contribute to the enterprise goal (though may help with the productivity on future tasks).

[Edit] As a result, they see high productivity, but do not see the focus shift. Staying on task is what is important in crunch mode, and there may be some utility to founders that have more tasks (and thus goals) in shifting focus, but larger organizations suffer from defocusing, task shifting, and worker collisions.

pg2• 14 years ago

Attitude? Your use of that word should set off alarm bells in your own head. I'm talking about a matter of fact, not a point of ideology.

I know people can work many more than 40 productive hours a week for years at a time because I did it myself during Viaweb. I know lots of YC founders who do as well.

I also know from my own experience that this ability varies between people. I can't work the hours now at 47 that I could at 30.

Why shouldn't ability to work vary among humans? Practically every other ability does.

nostrademons4• 14 years ago

Does RescueTime have any data on this? ISTR Tony posting here once that they measured the amount of time each startup in their batch spent in front of the editor, and the very top end came out to about 7 hours/day, with most clustered around 4-5 hours/day like the rest of us.

Edit: Found it.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=209195

7 hours was his personal max, 4-5 hours was his personal average, 10 hours was more than anyone in the group ever spent coding.

pfortuny• 14 years ago

You did not read the article, did you? What it shows is that it... does NOT depend from person to person as, say, the hair colour or the ability to sing properly.

crazygringo• 14 years ago

I think it's the sheer variety.

For example, at one point in my life I worked 8-hour office days and 8-hour evenings as a bartender. I was astonished to discover I could do this for months without getting exhausted at all, because they used completely different parts of my brains, with virtually zero overlap. Office work was intellectual, bar work was physical and social.

I personally can't do truly effective, intellectual coding for more than about four hours in a day. After that, it exhausts me. But I can happily deal with meetings, or project management, or marketing or whatnot. So because startup founders can often divide their time up into blocks of entirely different tasks, it makes sense they can work effectively over longer hours.

Note, I'm not talking about being interrupted all the time, though -- I'm talking about 4 hours of coding, 4 hours of meeting, 2 hours of product, 4 hours of marketing.

speleding• 14 years ago

I agree it seems common sense that the maximum number of productive hours would vary per person, just as so many other things in life. I would also expect that the number of productive hours is highly dependent on the type of work, the variation in the work, and the incentives people get. Startup work would be very different from other work in that respect.

Lots of people with a 40 hour work week go home to play a computer game for several hours a night. If your work was as much fun as playing a computer game you would have no problem working 10 hours a day. Startup work might be just as much fun as computer games?

BadassFractal• 14 years ago

It's depressing that this still has to be discussed. Folks, if you're marketable, please don't reward companies with your employment if they continuously death march you.

Never seen a single hour of that extra time either paid back or returned to you? Time to go. However it will require everybody to do their part to defeat the system.

Paul_S3• 14 years ago

Seeing as the average age in my industry is probably 25 I'd say it's not going to happen. The young ones are quite happy to be abused (and take some perverse enjoyment out of it).

People change companies frequently, but all the companies my friends work at now have the same set of issues. Then there are friends who quit the industry and got proper jobs. They just laugh at the whole thing. Granted they have a different kind of bullshit to deal with (bureaucracy in code, formal development) but the working conditions and remuneration just don't compare to gamedev so none of them returned and they think it was a good trade.

lottoro• 14 years ago

More data! We need data about average working hours and success of teams / companies in the tech industry.

Paul_S3• 14 years ago

Comparing data across companies is difficult - how do you control for other factors?

critium6• 14 years ago

Can I ask everybody here, why is it so prevalent in the Software industry? What other industry accepts crunch mode? I can think of only 2 (military, banking/finance) I mean, do the developers actually like it? Wannabe heroes?

chubot5• 14 years ago

Doctors do this. People making movies and tv shows are even worse. Lawyers to some extent. Management consulting. It's not just software.

parfe• 14 years ago

The staff at retail outlets don't work regular hours between Thanksgiving and Christmas, or your town's road department employees after a snowstorm, or the utility company crews following a hurricane. "Crunch time" as a programmer is kind of a joke. You sit in a chair some extra hours, mumble complaints about bad project management. and pat yourself on the back for your sacrifice.

Forums for tech self-select for ego stroking keyboard-warrior crunch time stories. Why would you see other industries complaining about crunch time bere?

I watched a facilities rep tell Big Payroll Vendor consultants that the 80 hour/week restriction had to be removed because crews work 100+ hour weeks to clean up the campus after storms. The consultants literally laughed in this guy's face and joked about how it would suck if someone actually had to work more than 80 hours in a week. Took a long awkward silence before they realized they had embarrassed themselves.

undantag• 14 years ago

This will be my takeaway tl;dr: "Crunch does not make the product ship sooner — it makes the product ready later. Crunch does not make the product better — it makes the product worse."

Far too many people in management don't get, or just choose to ignore, that.

I think I've already left a comment on a similar thread about leading a team through crunch with one of the devs still doing 6 hour days. Some more time has passed and I have to say even when the rest of the team are doing 8 hour days it still feels like there's a difference in focus, intuition and problem-solving.

Of course all that is highly subjective, but it made me think about how to measure the.. craftsmanship? Anyway, intuitively it feels like having a few more hours away from the office would give us some more time to subconciously process the problems and tasks at hand, and when we come back to work we're better prepared for it.

It can't be impossible to conduct some kind of test on this, can it?

daemon132• 14 years ago

In addition to [or may be instead of] this long article, one might look at the real examples of people, who achieved exceptional results whilst working less than 8 hours per day.

One such example is Roberto Goizueta, whose work habits at the helm of Coke were vividly described in this book - Greising, David (1989). I'd Like the World to Buy a Coke: The Life and Leadership of Roberto Goizueta.

RyanMcGreal• 14 years ago

Selected anecdotes are no replacement for empirical data.

daemon132• 14 years ago

I wonder how the researched biography stands for selected anecdote.

Roberto Goizueta was leaving his work at 3-4 p.m. daily. He almost never stayed till 5-6 p.m. or even overtime.

He managed to achieve this feat by focusing on three things:

1. capital allocations decisions;

2. people management (he personally made any/all personnel decisions for top 100 people);

3. managing Wall Street/analysts.

Compare this with current breed of CEOs/COOs/etc.

Paul_S3• 14 years ago

It's been proven repeatedly during the last 100 years that overtime doesn't work. Yet it falls on deaf ears in my industry. I've worked for 10 years in games development. Every single company had unpaid mandatory overtime. It's depressing.

Here's a solution. Pay your employees for overtime - suddenly you'll find a way to not do it. But it's too late, because it's now accepted (and expected). Even though it's counter productive.

woah• 14 years ago

Thanks for this. Noticed the same phenomenon during my art school days. A lot of students would consistently "brag" about pulling all nighters. Was their work better? No. It may work at the end of a project when you need to get some stuff wrapped up and have the adrenaline to keep you focused, but regularly? No. This is especially true in programming and especially design, where making the right decision is all that matters.

krosaen• 14 years ago

One thing I've observed while working at a tech company and then in trying to start my own is that "crunch mode" can be a protective mechanism to carve out some uninterrupted time. So it's not that working a 12 hour day coding is more productive than working an 8 hour day coding, it's that the first 8 hours are taken up with non coding tasks like meetings, project planning, marketing, responding to emails, intros, etc and the only way to get any coding done is to stay late when no one else is expecting you to be around or on email.

If you find yourself working 12+ hour days ask yourself, how many hours a day do you really have your full well rested mind at your disposal during an uninterrupted period of time? If it's 4 or less, chances are you aren't getting any more important work done, and you are quite possibly getting less done because the hours you have to spend on the creative tasks are not with a fully rested brain.

Why Crunch Mode Doesn't Work

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