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286 hours in one month. That's just crazy and will lead straight to burn-out if you ask me. Learn to relax man. Where I live (Denmark) the work week is 37 hour

by jjuhl 11y ago

286 hours in one month. That's just crazy and will lead straight to burn-out if you ask me. Learn to relax man. Where I live (Denmark) the work week is 37 hours (so roughly 150hrs/month) and if i stretch that to even 40 I can feel the toll it takes. Sure, when I was 25 I could work 200-300hr months, but that did eventually land me in hospital due to stress and generally being burned out. Take care of yourself and don't work too hard. It's not worth it.

MIKarlsen 11y ago
From Denmark, and that was what shook me as well! Seems like INSANELY much. We don't know if the data collected is from the total hours of "on-time" of the computer. This would mean that procrastination could be taking up the majority of the spare time. I'm on my computer around 10-12 hours a day studying, working, blogging and just browsing the Internet and would not be surprised if I spend around 286 hours a month at the keyboard. But it's not work all of it. EDIT: On the frontpage he writes "By day I’m an engineer at Wave. (Also frequently by night because I really like my work.)"
dtech 11y ago
It's somewhat different for working at startups and for founders, but it's a Europe v.s. America culture difference. Americans are very proud to work 70 hours a week and take no or 2 weeks vacation a year, Europeans call them crazy for doing it.
- umanwizard 11y ago
  It's reductionist to say Americans are "proud" of this. Maybe some loud faction is. A lot of educated Americans (anecdotally I'd say the majority) envy Europe and think there is a lot wrong with our work-driven culture.
  - draw_down 11y ago
    I don't think it needs to be the case that 100% of Americans do something, in order to discuss it as an American phenomenon
    - maxerickson 11y ago
      Sure, but the GPs point that many Americans wouldn't do it either is part of that discussion.
- vidarh 11y ago
  Having worked 70 hour weeks myself, and having worked with Americans doing 70 hours weeks in startups: Outside of very short intervals, I've yet to meet a single person (myself included) in mentally demanding jobs who actually increase their productivity more than very marginally (in terms of work accomplished in a week) this way. I'm sure exceptions exists, but in 20 years in development and operations work I've yet to meet them. In fact, I've had to order people to go home and sleep because they measurably increased the defect rates for our code enough to become a net drain. In other words: I don't just see it as crazy, I see it as inefficient and a quick way to burn out without accomplishing much. While there may be culture differences involved, the reason I think this is an issue at all is a combination of lack of capturing and reviewing metrics of productivity coupled with a lot of people being delusional about their own work capacity (see the lack of metrics bit) and others being forced to keep up or look lazy in comparison. I way to often see people having problems getting "enough" work done while being noticeable and obviously slowed down by lack of sleep, for example, only for their response to be to work longer and slow down even more.
  - leroy_masochist 11y ago
    > Outside of very short intervals, I've yet to meet a single person (myself included) in mentally demanding jobs who actually increase their productivity more than very marginally (in terms of work accomplished in a week) this way. I'm sure exceptions exists, but in 20 years in development and operations work I've yet to meet them. I think this rule-of-thumb holds true when you are doing intellectually stimulating, challenging work that requires that you be your "best self". Unfortunately there are a lot of jobs out there, the great majority of jobs in point of fact, where marginal productivity doesn't drop off precipitously past 40 or 60 or even 80 hours. Investment banking comes to mind....
    - vidarh 11y ago
      I don't know any investment bankers, so maybe that's true. Certainly there are jobs that requires little enough of you that you can keep doing the same thing for twice as long. But I'm not convinced that it is "the great majority of jobs". Even in a lot of manual jobs the true cost of reduced attention gets obscured in increased error rates, increased accidents (and according insurance and compensation costs) and burn outs (resulting in higher churn and increased hiring costs). I'm sure some have numbers that prove it's better for them to push staff harder (and places with extremely high salaries like investment banking certainly can take larger productivity drops and still come out ahead than most places), but most places I've worked and most companies I've contracted for, have no clue at all even how to measure their staffs productivity, much less do it on a regular basis. In a few jobs I for the first time (for my managers) started delivering weekly reports that did not just report what we'd done, but combined the reported time spent with average salaries by function and assigned them to products and feature requests etc.. Doing that in my experience always leads to uncomfortable conversations in the team afterwards when management realises what different decisions actually costs. (Amusingly, or depressingly, a common response to me actually asking for average salary information was confusion even when I explained that I was going to report on costs; apparently this is quite unusual for development teams in tech companies to do other than in aggregate for whole departments, which is just plain ridiculous) Generally I take anyone claiming to be just as productive over long hours with a huge amount of salt unless they can explain exactly how they've actually measured it - usually it turns out people are "self reporting" what they think is the case because they feel busier. Often because their productivity has actually suffered, and made them busier.
- nickbauman 11y ago
  There have been numerous studies since WWII that have shown that working more than 40 hours per week only gets you more from your workforce for a very short period of time. As in 2 weeks. And for that two week period the amount of increase you get only happens if you're not going over 10% increase. So ~50 hours. Generally speaking, those who are working 70 hours a week are doing what could be considered productivity theater.
  - LoSboccacc 11y ago
    ^ this. If you can work 70 hours a week with no productivity loss you have the kind of work machines/software will automate away shortly.
  - blfr 11y ago
    Can you cite a few? Robin Hanson analysed it a while back[1] and it was 60 hours for peak productivity with unknown applicability to modern workplace. [1] http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/12/construction-peak-60hrwk.html http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/12/construction-peak-60hr...
- jlarocco 11y ago
  I think that's over stating it quite a bit. Most people don't work anywhere near 70 hours a week. I think even fewer of them are proud of it. The reason you hear about it is because the few people who do it are trying to justify it.
Bahamut 11y ago
I typically work about 37 hours a week at a small company in Palo Alto - my work productivity is very high, since it's less of a pressure cooker for coding. However, I do typically spend about 4 hours outside of work a day on open source - the trick for me is that I do open source at my own leisure, which gives me as much space as I want, say if I want to take time off for vacation, a date, etc.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
msbarnett 11y ago
Already looks like he's well into burn out territory. Those numbers have him spending more than a full normal work week per month on "procrastination". It looks to me that he's having an enormous amount of trouble focusing on work, and trying to compensate by working crazy hours. That's the vicious cycle of burnout -- eroded focus leads to more hours to get things done leads to further collapse in the ability to focus on anything.
- vidarh 11y ago
  I agree. Personally I generally don't believe most people are capable of even meeting 37-40 hours a week of productive time. 30 maybe. Sitting in a desk for 40 hours (or 60 or 80), sure. Doing work spread out over that time, sure. But none of my most productive time periods have ever coincided with the time periods I've put in the most hours. And I've yet to see someone get through a 37 or 40 hour work without spending a substantial proportion on them zoning out with non-work stuff or just being slow and lacking in concentration from time to time. Or both. The longer the work, the worse it gets. These days, I do sometimes still put in ridiculous weeks, but they are rare, and they are often explicitly with the trade-off that I know I'll take productivity hits and where I carefully schedule naps and caffeine etc. accordingly in order to be productive when it counts and "phone it in" when I can get away with merely being physically present (e.g. when someone drags me to meetings I know there's no real reason for me to be at). In my experience with long weeks like that, most of the time the reason for the long hours is usually 90% about politics and meeting room posturing and someone panicking than it is about actual productivity benefits. It may be worth putting up with occasionally to humour someone important enough to your income, but these days I refuse to let it be a major part of my life. There are the rare exception where there are genuine crises that really actually need everyone to be present for long periods, but if they are frequent, something is very wrong. In 20 years, apart from dealing with alerts keeping me awake for a few hours here and there, and where I compensate by according rest afterwards, I've maybe experienced 2-3 extended periods of excessive working hours for multiple days after each other where it was actually necessary.
  - freditup 11y ago
    Agreed 100%. I feel like I could get as much done with a 25hr/wk workweek instead of 40hr/wk. I try to stay focused and work hard for those 40+ hrs each week, but things eventually trail off anyways.
SatvikBeri 11y ago
Note that 286 is hours in front of a computer, not hours at work.
benkuhn 11y ago
I evidently need to make this more clear in the article, but RescueTime captures all time I spend in front of the computer, not just work time. My actual work time is about 50h/week, which is probably about average for software people in my area. In fact, it's probably on the low end if you factor in that everyone else spends 10h/week commuting into San Francisco. I find my job incredibly exciting and rewarding, so I don’t find that amount of work burdensome. YMMV, of course :)

by jjuhl 11y ago

MIKarlsen 11y ago

From Denmark, and that was what shook me as well! Seems like INSANELY much. We don't know if the data collected is from the total hours of "on-time" of the computer. This would mean that procrastination could be taking up the majority of the spare time. I'm on my computer around 10-12 hours a day studying, working, blogging and just browsing the Internet and would not be surprised if I spend around 286 hours a month at the keyboard. But it's not work all of it. EDIT: On the frontpage he writes "By day I’m an engineer at Wave. (Also frequently by night because I really like my work.)"

dtech 11y ago

It's somewhat different for working at startups and for founders, but it's a Europe v.s. America culture difference. Americans are very proud to work 70 hours a week and take no or 2 weeks vacation a year, Europeans call them crazy for doing it.

umanwizard 11y ago
It's reductionist to say Americans are "proud" of this. Maybe some loud faction is. A lot of educated Americans (anecdotally I'd say the majority) envy Europe and think there is a lot wrong with our work-driven culture.
- draw_down 11y ago
  I don't think it needs to be the case that 100% of Americans do something, in order to discuss it as an American phenomenon
  - maxerickson 11y ago
    Sure, but the GPs point that many Americans wouldn't do it either is part of that discussion.
vidarh 11y ago
Having worked 70 hour weeks myself, and having worked with Americans doing 70 hours weeks in startups: Outside of very short intervals, I've yet to meet a single person (myself included) in mentally demanding jobs who actually increase their productivity more than very marginally (in terms of work accomplished in a week) this way. I'm sure exceptions exists, but in 20 years in development and operations work I've yet to meet them. In fact, I've had to order people to go home and sleep because they measurably increased the defect rates for our code enough to become a net drain. In other words: I don't just see it as crazy, I see it as inefficient and a quick way to burn out without accomplishing much. While there may be culture differences involved, the reason I think this is an issue at all is a combination of lack of capturing and reviewing metrics of productivity coupled with a lot of people being delusional about their own work capacity (see the lack of metrics bit) and others being forced to keep up or look lazy in comparison. I way to often see people having problems getting "enough" work done while being noticeable and obviously slowed down by lack of sleep, for example, only for their response to be to work longer and slow down even more.
- leroy_masochist 11y ago
  > Outside of very short intervals, I've yet to meet a single person (myself included) in mentally demanding jobs who actually increase their productivity more than very marginally (in terms of work accomplished in a week) this way. I'm sure exceptions exists, but in 20 years in development and operations work I've yet to meet them. I think this rule-of-thumb holds true when you are doing intellectually stimulating, challenging work that requires that you be your "best self". Unfortunately there are a lot of jobs out there, the great majority of jobs in point of fact, where marginal productivity doesn't drop off precipitously past 40 or 60 or even 80 hours. Investment banking comes to mind....
  - vidarh 11y ago
    I don't know any investment bankers, so maybe that's true. Certainly there are jobs that requires little enough of you that you can keep doing the same thing for twice as long. But I'm not convinced that it is "the great majority of jobs". Even in a lot of manual jobs the true cost of reduced attention gets obscured in increased error rates, increased accidents (and according insurance and compensation costs) and burn outs (resulting in higher churn and increased hiring costs). I'm sure some have numbers that prove it's better for them to push staff harder (and places with extremely high salaries like investment banking certainly can take larger productivity drops and still come out ahead than most places), but most places I've worked and most companies I've contracted for, have no clue at all even how to measure their staffs productivity, much less do it on a regular basis. In a few jobs I for the first time (for my managers) started delivering weekly reports that did not just report what we'd done, but combined the reported time spent with average salaries by function and assigned them to products and feature requests etc.. Doing that in my experience always leads to uncomfortable conversations in the team afterwards when management realises what different decisions actually costs. (Amusingly, or depressingly, a common response to me actually asking for average salary information was confusion even when I explained that I was going to report on costs; apparently this is quite unusual for development teams in tech companies to do other than in aggregate for whole departments, which is just plain ridiculous) Generally I take anyone claiming to be just as productive over long hours with a huge amount of salt unless they can explain exactly how they've actually measured it - usually it turns out people are "self reporting" what they think is the case because they feel busier. Often because their productivity has actually suffered, and made them busier.
nickbauman 11y ago
There have been numerous studies since WWII that have shown that working more than 40 hours per week only gets you more from your workforce for a very short period of time. As in 2 weeks. And for that two week period the amount of increase you get only happens if you're not going over 10% increase. So ~50 hours. Generally speaking, those who are working 70 hours a week are doing what could be considered productivity theater.
- LoSboccacc 11y ago
  ^ this. If you can work 70 hours a week with no productivity loss you have the kind of work machines/software will automate away shortly.
- blfr 11y ago
  Can you cite a few? Robin Hanson analysed it a while back[1] and it was 60 hours for peak productivity with unknown applicability to modern workplace. [1] http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/12/construction-peak-60hrwk.html http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/12/construction-peak-60hr...
jlarocco 11y ago
I think that's over stating it quite a bit. Most people don't work anywhere near 70 hours a week. I think even fewer of them are proud of it. The reason you hear about it is because the few people who do it are trying to justify it.

Bahamut 11y ago

I typically work about 37 hours a week at a small company in Palo Alto - my work productivity is very high, since it's less of a pressure cooker for coding. However, I do typically spend about 4 hours outside of work a day on open source - the trick for me is that I do open source at my own leisure, which gives me as much space as I want, say if I want to take time off for vacation, a date, etc.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

msbarnett 11y ago

Already looks like he's well into burn out territory. Those numbers have him spending more than a full normal work week per month on "procrastination". It looks to me that he's having an enormous amount of trouble focusing on work, and trying to compensate by working crazy hours. That's the vicious cycle of burnout -- eroded focus leads to more hours to get things done leads to further collapse in the ability to focus on anything.

vidarh 11y ago
I agree. Personally I generally don't believe most people are capable of even meeting 37-40 hours a week of productive time. 30 maybe. Sitting in a desk for 40 hours (or 60 or 80), sure. Doing work spread out over that time, sure. But none of my most productive time periods have ever coincided with the time periods I've put in the most hours. And I've yet to see someone get through a 37 or 40 hour work without spending a substantial proportion on them zoning out with non-work stuff or just being slow and lacking in concentration from time to time. Or both. The longer the work, the worse it gets. These days, I do sometimes still put in ridiculous weeks, but they are rare, and they are often explicitly with the trade-off that I know I'll take productivity hits and where I carefully schedule naps and caffeine etc. accordingly in order to be productive when it counts and "phone it in" when I can get away with merely being physically present (e.g. when someone drags me to meetings I know there's no real reason for me to be at). In my experience with long weeks like that, most of the time the reason for the long hours is usually 90% about politics and meeting room posturing and someone panicking than it is about actual productivity benefits. It may be worth putting up with occasionally to humour someone important enough to your income, but these days I refuse to let it be a major part of my life. There are the rare exception where there are genuine crises that really actually need everyone to be present for long periods, but if they are frequent, something is very wrong. In 20 years, apart from dealing with alerts keeping me awake for a few hours here and there, and where I compensate by according rest afterwards, I've maybe experienced 2-3 extended periods of excessive working hours for multiple days after each other where it was actually necessary.
- freditup 11y ago
  Agreed 100%. I feel like I could get as much done with a 25hr/wk workweek instead of 40hr/wk. I try to stay focused and work hard for those 40+ hrs each week, but things eventually trail off anyways.

SatvikBeri 11y ago

Note that 286 is hours in front of a computer, not hours at work.

benkuhn 11y ago

I evidently need to make this more clear in the article, but RescueTime captures all time I spend in front of the computer, not just work time. My actual work time is about 50h/week, which is probably about average for software people in my area. In fact, it's probably on the low end if you factor in that everyone else spends 10h/week commuting into San Francisco. I find my job incredibly exciting and rewarding, so I don’t find that amount of work burdensome. YMMV, of course :)