7 ms·

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

by 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.

by dtech 11y ago

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.