13 ms·

Work Hard, Live Well

235 points by sethbannon 11y ago

biggio 11y ago
Working hard cannot exist with living well
- tempodox 11y ago
  I'd refine that to “working too hard...”.
- prof_hobart 11y ago
  Why not?
  - biggio 11y 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.
    - prof_hobart 11y ago
      I'm not sure it is being defined that way. If anything, I'm reading the opposite of that - that it's entirely possible to work "hard" without working for extremely long hours.
- MaulingMonkey 11y 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.
  - dasboth 11y 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.
  - jo909 11y 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.
    - MaulingMonkey 11y ago
      > 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. Working hard's not easy, and something I continue to try and figure out how to optimize further. I use small wagers (e.g. coffee) with coworkers to help with motivation, noise canceling headphones and asynchronous communication (IRC, email) to help minimize flow disruptions, website blocks to break idle browsing habits, task lists and breakdowns to help eliminate "uhh... what next?" indecision, single-tasking as much as possible... Friends and new tech I can sometimes integrate into work, but yeah, not always. > 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. At this point, I'll push back hard on management that asks me for more than 8 hours, and it's a serious consideration when job hunting. I'm willing to, on occasion, put more than that in - if I'm convinced the occasion warrants sacrificing long term productivity for some very short term gains - but I'm not willing to let it become a pattern. Even then, at 12 hours, I'm typically a mindless zombie suitable for little more than manual input fuzzing (read: mindlessly spamming inputs), running build scripts that were prepared and debugged earlier, and uploading build artifacts. I'm not even productive short term for most work tasks anymore. Even bug fixes may do more harm than good. I've even managed to frame it as an ethics issue to myself: Allowing my employer to repeatedly sacrifice my long term productivity for extremely short term gains is doing wrong by myself, and doing wrong by my employer. Worst case scenario, if (respectfully) standing up to management gets me fired, or turns the work environment toxic, I have another opportunity to find a job that appreciates my work instead of my self-flagellation.
tempodox 11y ago
It should be, “earn shitloads of money and live well”. Working hard has nothing to do with it, at best.
rsp1984 11y 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 11y 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
  - rsp1984 11y 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.
- pjmlp 11y ago
  80 hours?! Oh man, I am really glad to live in Europe.
  - SmellyGeekBoy 11y 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.
thenomad 11y 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.
- lordnacho 11y 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 11y ago
    I know more than a few people who could do with understanding what you just said.
  - thenomad 11y 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.
rmc 11y 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.
- lordnacho 11y 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.
  - jasonkester 11y 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.
    - lordnacho 11y ago
      Yes, this makes sense too. Assuming quality is clear to whoever is buying your labour. Quite often it isn't. I've talked to a number of people who pulled the "I can get this done cheaper" line when discussing projects with me. They always get turned down.
    - Disruptive_Dave 11y ago
      You've hit on the underlying problem of this entire discussion; the way employees are judged. Regardless of what annual review process paperwork says, or what ideals we all pay lip service to, the fact remains that many (in the US, at least) businesses do not actually reward employees (salary, promotions, better projects) based on output and productivity. Between political games, friends helping friends, back-scratchings galore, and very different workplace experiences based on who your direct manager is, the system is seemingly FUBAR.
oulu2006 11y 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 11y 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 11y 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
lordnacho 11y 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_ 11y 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_v 11y ago
    Yeah because ibanking is an hourly job rollseyes
  - pjc50 11y 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.
    - elros 11y ago
      > it matters only that they're foregoing whatever else they could be doing with their life in order to make this deal That is so sad it almost makes me weep. I am thankful every day that I get to both work with cutting-edge tech, being productive, and also have a very healthy work/life balance.
35h34 11y 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 11y ago
  Basically, speaking first-hand, progress on side projects is dog slow.
- rwallace 11y 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.
FlyingSnake 11y 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 11y ago
  Any countries or companies in particular?
  - elros 11y ago
    I've been working in Germany for three years now. Can back up OP completely.
  - anon4 11y 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.
    - bildung 11y ago
      > and I think in Germany it's a minimum of 6 weeks. By law its 4 weeks minimum in Germany, too (more if you are younger than 18). But many industries gained 6 weeks through collective bargaining/unions.
  - FlyingSnake 11y ago
    Germany, NL, Nordic Countries, Poland and CZ are pretty relaxed about work.
Bostonian 11y 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."
- papapra 11y ago
  But if you take in account the statistics of how many start-ups succeed, that's not a great deal...
- pjc50 11y ago
  "If you work really hard, you should be able to produce a baby in only three months!"
- normloman 11y 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 11y 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.
AndrewKemendo 11y 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.
- georgefrick 11y 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_v 11y 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.
    - AndrewKemendo 11y ago
      This is my point. Finance, Medicine, Legal - hell even people building pipelines or working long haul logistics etc... all have the same situations. I think there is value in companies that are 9-5, but those are not $BN high impact companies. The only major organizations with those hours are select government agencies.
epalmer 11y 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 11y 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.
  - epalmer 11y 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 11y 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.
mellavora 11y 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.
- anon4 11y 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.
  - AndrewKemendo 11y 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."
  - mellavora 11y 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.
pjc50 11y 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 11y 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 11y ago
    18 months pay in one hit must have been nice!
  - pjc50 11y 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.
transfire 11y 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 11y 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 11y 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 11y 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 11y 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.

235 points by sethbannon 11y ago

biggio 11y ago

Working hard cannot exist with living well

tempodox 11y ago
I'd refine that to “working too hard...”.
prof_hobart 11y ago
Why not?
- biggio 11y 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.
  - prof_hobart 11y ago
    I'm not sure it is being defined that way. If anything, I'm reading the opposite of that - that it's entirely possible to work "hard" without working for extremely long hours.
MaulingMonkey 11y 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.
- dasboth 11y 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.
- jo909 11y 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.
  - MaulingMonkey 11y ago
    > 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. Working hard's not easy, and something I continue to try and figure out how to optimize further. I use small wagers (e.g. coffee) with coworkers to help with motivation, noise canceling headphones and asynchronous communication (IRC, email) to help minimize flow disruptions, website blocks to break idle browsing habits, task lists and breakdowns to help eliminate "uhh... what next?" indecision, single-tasking as much as possible... Friends and new tech I can sometimes integrate into work, but yeah, not always. > 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. At this point, I'll push back hard on management that asks me for more than 8 hours, and it's a serious consideration when job hunting. I'm willing to, on occasion, put more than that in - if I'm convinced the occasion warrants sacrificing long term productivity for some very short term gains - but I'm not willing to let it become a pattern. Even then, at 12 hours, I'm typically a mindless zombie suitable for little more than manual input fuzzing (read: mindlessly spamming inputs), running build scripts that were prepared and debugged earlier, and uploading build artifacts. I'm not even productive short term for most work tasks anymore. Even bug fixes may do more harm than good. I've even managed to frame it as an ethics issue to myself: Allowing my employer to repeatedly sacrifice my long term productivity for extremely short term gains is doing wrong by myself, and doing wrong by my employer. Worst case scenario, if (respectfully) standing up to management gets me fired, or turns the work environment toxic, I have another opportunity to find a job that appreciates my work instead of my self-flagellation.

tempodox 11y ago

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

rsp1984 11y 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 11y 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
- rsp1984 11y 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.
pjmlp 11y ago
80 hours?! Oh man, I am really glad to live in Europe.
- SmellyGeekBoy 11y 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.

thenomad 11y 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.

lordnacho 11y 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 11y ago
  I know more than a few people who could do with understanding what you just said.
- thenomad 11y 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.

rmc 11y 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.

lordnacho 11y 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.
- jasonkester 11y 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.
  - lordnacho 11y ago
    Yes, this makes sense too. Assuming quality is clear to whoever is buying your labour. Quite often it isn't. I've talked to a number of people who pulled the "I can get this done cheaper" line when discussing projects with me. They always get turned down.
  - Disruptive_Dave 11y ago
    You've hit on the underlying problem of this entire discussion; the way employees are judged. Regardless of what annual review process paperwork says, or what ideals we all pay lip service to, the fact remains that many (in the US, at least) businesses do not actually reward employees (salary, promotions, better projects) based on output and productivity. Between political games, friends helping friends, back-scratchings galore, and very different workplace experiences based on who your direct manager is, the system is seemingly FUBAR.

oulu2006 11y 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 11y 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 11y 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

lordnacho 11y 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_ 11y 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_v 11y ago
  Yeah because ibanking is an hourly job rollseyes
- pjc50 11y 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.
  - elros 11y ago
    > it matters only that they're foregoing whatever else they could be doing with their life in order to make this deal That is so sad it almost makes me weep. I am thankful every day that I get to both work with cutting-edge tech, being productive, and also have a very healthy work/life balance.

35h34 11y 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 11y ago
Basically, speaking first-hand, progress on side projects is dog slow.
rwallace 11y 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.

FlyingSnake 11y 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 11y ago
Any countries or companies in particular?
- elros 11y ago
  I've been working in Germany for three years now. Can back up OP completely.
- anon4 11y 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.
  - bildung 11y ago
    > and I think in Germany it's a minimum of 6 weeks. By law its 4 weeks minimum in Germany, too (more if you are younger than 18). But many industries gained 6 weeks through collective bargaining/unions.
- FlyingSnake 11y ago
  Germany, NL, Nordic Countries, Poland and CZ are pretty relaxed about work.

Bostonian 11y 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."

papapra 11y ago
But if you take in account the statistics of how many start-ups succeed, that's not a great deal...
pjc50 11y ago
"If you work really hard, you should be able to produce a baby in only three months!"
normloman 11y 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 11y 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.

AndrewKemendo 11y 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.

georgefrick 11y 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_v 11y 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.
  - AndrewKemendo 11y ago
    This is my point. Finance, Medicine, Legal - hell even people building pipelines or working long haul logistics etc... all have the same situations. I think there is value in companies that are 9-5, but those are not $BN high impact companies. The only major organizations with those hours are select government agencies.

epalmer 11y 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 11y 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.
- epalmer 11y 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 11y 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.

mellavora 11y 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.

anon4 11y 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.
- AndrewKemendo 11y 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."
- mellavora 11y 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.

pjc50 11y 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 11y 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 11y ago
  18 months pay in one hit must have been nice!
- pjc50 11y 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.

transfire 11y 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 11y 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 11y 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 11y 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 11y 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.