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I don't necessarily disagree with DHH's points, but most of his stuff comes across as completely oblivious to the fact he's not representative of the average st

I don't necessarily disagree with DHH's points, but most of his stuff comes across as completely oblivious to the fact he's not representative of the average startuper/developer. He's a complete outlier. Sure, you can succeed if you're a top 0.1% programmer, and you don't have to work as much as other people. Do other people who are ambitious but not quite as talented have the same luxury?

Daishiman 9y ago
Can you afford to not work at the peak of your intellect? I tried the whole busting ass thing in my early years as a freelancer. I bombed, my output went down with no correlation to working hours whatsoever, I developed obvious markers for anxiety and it took years to get away from that. Maybe if your job consists of answer dumb emails every day, but there's indeed a very limited number of productive, concentrated work you can get done during the day. Most of the people who claim to work excessive amounts of overtime waste a humongous amount of time on meetings, confirmations, transportation and phone calls. If anything, they might have a mission and purpose that helps them stay up. But to pretend that you can crank out code like a machine all day every day is the biggest greatest farce of our profession.
walterra 9y ago
I think the more common ground here is that _all_ very successful people are outliers regardless if they work "hard" or not.
- davidivadavid 9y ago
  That may be that case, but the more relevant question is whether non-outliers can benefit from hard work. DHH says no (because he's a biased outlier, in my opinion). I would say it's far from clear.
s73ver 9y ago
Well, given that, in the vast majority of cases, busting your ass for a startup doesn't get you anything (either the company still fails, or your equity gets dilluted to shit and you lose money compared to what you would have had working a normal job with normal hours over that time period), even if you're not a "top programmer", it doesn't make sense.

Daishiman 9y ago

Can you afford to not work at the peak of your intellect? I tried the whole busting ass thing in my early years as a freelancer. I bombed, my output went down with no correlation to working hours whatsoever, I developed obvious markers for anxiety and it took years to get away from that. Maybe if your job consists of answer dumb emails every day, but there's indeed a very limited number of productive, concentrated work you can get done during the day. Most of the people who claim to work excessive amounts of overtime waste a humongous amount of time on meetings, confirmations, transportation and phone calls. If anything, they might have a mission and purpose that helps them stay up. But to pretend that you can crank out code like a machine all day every day is the biggest greatest farce of our profession.

walterra 9y ago

I think the more common ground here is that _all_ very successful people are outliers regardless if they work "hard" or not.

davidivadavid 9y ago
That may be that case, but the more relevant question is whether non-outliers can benefit from hard work. DHH says no (because he's a biased outlier, in my opinion). I would say it's far from clear.

s73ver 9y ago

Well, given that, in the vast majority of cases, busting your ass for a startup doesn't get you anything (either the company still fails, or your equity gets dilluted to shit and you lose money compared to what you would have had working a normal job with normal hours over that time period), even if you're not a "top programmer", it doesn't make sense.