17 ms·

People Who Claim to Work 75-Hour Weeks Usually Only Work About 50 Hours

377 points by ekovarski 7y ago

rogerkirkness 7y ago
Actually working more than ~55 hours in a week is soul crushing and physically very hard. At a certain point you would need an escalation of stimulants or risk not being able to get out of bed if you actually worked 75 hours.
- ska 7y ago
  Hence some of the dysfunction in medicine.
  - ridgewell 7y ago
    Medicine is an interesting case. The prioritization isn't so much on the health of medical practitioners and nurses, but on patient safety. It is argued that patients have higher survivability rates when patient handoffs/shift changes are kept to a minimum. The focus has never been on the health of doctors, nurses, X-Ray technicians, etc. but from a public health perspective. This has far-reaching consequences in itself.
    - Scoundreller 7y ago
      The nurses may be working 12 hour shifts, but they’re unlikely to work more than 4 in a week. Overtime is expensive for employers, so they prefer to hire more or hire contract nurses where necessary. Even the doctors usually cover 12 clinical 12hr shifts a month. They may do more work after another takes over, academic work, moonlight, or have admin work. And having a good income allows you to buy your way out of most modern problems/work, like comparison shopping, cleaning, or even having and then raising their children for them.
      - kelnos 7y ago
        A friend of mine who is a nurse tells me that she's at the hospital an hour before her shift starts (in order to prep) and is there a good hour after her shift ends (in order to help prep the next shift). So she's effectively working nearly 14 hours a day, even though she only works 3-4 consecutive days. I stretches credibility to me that people can keep up a high quality of work for 14 hours straight, even with a 3 day break every 3-4 days.
      - RHSeeger 7y ago
        > The nurses may be working 12 hour shifts, but they’re unlikely to work more than 4 in a week. Overtime is expensive for employers, so they prefer to hire more or hire contract nurses where necessary. Or they're picking up more hours at a different hospital, so there's no overtime but they still make more.
    - ska 7y ago
      Yes, I've heard that argument before. I've asked before if the research shows the problem is handoffs per se, or the protocol around them, but haven't had a good answer. There also doesn't seem to be good research into the longer term impact of these negative consequences on the practitioners. I've worked around clinicians and clinical staff, and several times been surprised how much is left to personal memory and scheduling, including some inherently risky protocols/procedures that are at all functional only because the people doing them are careful ... some of these obviously easily improvable.
      - kelnos 7y ago
        I have several friends who are doctors or nurses, and have talked with most of them about this. They all parrot the "doctor/nurse-patient continuity" line, but when pressed as to whether fewer handoffs actually outweigh the effects of exhaustion on outcomes, they all seem to take it as a given that it does, without being able to support it. I suspect that, even if fewer handoffs does take an edge over exhaustion, the handoff process could be improved greatly; from what I'm told, handoff processes vary wildly, often aren't formalized, and even when they are, adherence to process is pretty lax, in part due to the effects of exhaustion.
        ska 7y ago
        It’s really interesting to do workflow analysis in clinical settings. It’s not uncommon to run into “we do it this way because that’s the way we’ve always done it” situations. There is also a bit of machismo/pride for the shifts worked thing, which isn’t helpful.
    - tonyedgecombe 7y ago
      I've just been reading Why we sleep by Matthew Walker. In it he mentions doctors will on average kill one patient during their residency due to sleep deprivation.
- darkr 7y ago
  In my personal and subjective experience, working beyond 55 hours in a week is very doable... But it's absolutely not sustainable. I've found that doing it for more than 2-3 weeks in a row will generally result in declining productivity and burnout after that, requiring 2-3 weeks of 0-30 hour work weeks afterwards to recover. Some hard learned lessons that I now adhere to: * Don't push past 50 hours a week regularly * If you do, cut your hours down to below 40 the following week, or even take some days off * Take at least one full weekend off at least once per month
- mdorazio 7y ago
  I can confirm. In the consulting world I've had several instances of either being doubled up on projects or having to hit extremely demanding deadlines for milestone payouts that required legitimate 60+ hour weeks. One week is doable, 2 is a stretch, beyond that people (myself included) generally had to turn to things like modafinil to keep going and there's a noticeable toll on general health and wellness. On the flip side, people who say they work stupid hours are usually just at the office stupid hours, not necessarily working all the time. But so are people who say they work 40 hour weeks. From working with hundreds of "normal" employees at clients over the years, I'd say the average actual productive time per person is around 25 hours.
  - okmokmz 7y ago
    >But so are people who say they work 40 hour weeks. From working with hundreds of "normal" employees at clients over the years, I'd say the average actual productive time per person is around 25 hours Agreed, I'd be surprised if I spent more than 25 hours a week actually actively working
- bluGill 7y ago
  I have found that I have 35 hours of good code in me per week. I make sure that I average at least 1 hour a day for meetings just so I can hit my 40 hour mark (this isn't hard). I can work more hours for a couple weeks if needed, but my quality goes down a little each week.
- stjohnswarts 7y ago
  40 hours is enough for me.
bryanlarsen 7y ago
And even if they do spend 75 hours at their workplace, they're probably spending far less than 40 actually working. (says the guy posting on HN instead of actually working).
- Matticus_Rex 7y ago
  Also true of people who spend 40 hours at their workplace, which is totally fine (and often necessary!) for most knowledge work.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- seppin 7y ago
  > And even if they do spend 75 hours at their workplace, they're probably spending far less than 40 actually working. Interesting, in Europe the hours are less but you are expected to work every minute you are there. In America you are expected to physically stay longer but being on FB/Reddit is no big deal. Sounds like a bad way of doing things.
  - balfirevic 7y ago
    > Interesting, in Europe the hours are less but you are expected to work every minute you are there. No, you're not. Also, Europe is large and diverse. Source: European.
    - cocochanel 7y ago
      Seconded from another European. HN and Reddit are big chunks of the work day. Heck, people even watch YouTube.
    - drilldrive 7y ago
      Most people unfortunately refer to Europe when they mean north-west Europe or even the Nordic countries alone.
S_A_P 7y ago
I’m currently working legit 65-70 hours per week. We have a hard stop that costs millions if we miss. It basically means 6am-6pm Monday through Saturday. I’m not as productive as when I work less but there is a net win in productivity. I don’t think I can do this for much more than a few months. I can already tell it has markedly harmed my health. Being stressed for months at a time is hard.
- ridgewell 7y ago
  People like to bring up the long hours that workers in Asian countries stay in the office or workplace for to justify long work weeks in North America and Europe when needed. In practice, they drag out their work day (eat breakfast, take showers, go to the gym, go on their phone) and don't really work significant hours in the end. Their productivity in terms of economic value produced per hour is markedly lower than most western countries. [1] Doing real work for 65-70 hours is markedly dissimilar and very detrimental to your health. Not even sure if most people could say they could last for a few more months. [1] https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2018/09/11/commentary/japan-commentary/omotenashi-underlies-japans-low-economic-productivity/ https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2018/09/11/commentary/j...
  - notfromhere 7y ago
    You can't. After a few solid months of 70 hour weeks you start seeing some serious health effects (blood pressure spikes, nervous system issues triggered by high levels of persistent stress, insomnia, exhaustion, etc).
    - smallgovt 7y ago
      This is quite a generalization. It depends on how much you value and enjoy your work. And, every person's limit is different. There exist people on both extremes.
      - kelnos 7y ago
        It's a generalization that the data seems to support. Sure, there are always outliers, but in general, 70+ hours per week over several weeks to months will severely damage your health. Note that we're talking about 70 hours of actual work. Being in the office for 70 hours but only working 50 hours is what's more common, and doesn't cause the same hit to your health.
secfirstmd 7y ago
I recently starting using a training a productivity tracker that has a decent mix of tracking but keeping the data local. It's really amazing to see how time is spent in the office. If on a very unusual and rare day of say 10 hours, I might be lucky to get 6 hours of actual work (with maybe an hour of deep work in there).
- drjesusphd 7y ago
  What software is this productivity tracker?
  - secfirstmd 7y ago
    Qbserve
    - nullandvoid 7y ago
      Thanks this sounds like something I'd like to try - are there any others you considered whilst looking around as that is mac only and I'm Windows unfltunately ( or any one else in this thread do something similar )
      - Noumenon72 7y ago
        I'm using Timeular which is an octahedron with erasable sides. It tracks whichever side is facing up. You just have to remember to flip it, which is a good way to notice 'hey, should I really be switching tasks'?
      - secfirstmd 7y ago
        Yes I think I remember RescueTime but that doesn't store your data locally I think?
Theodores 7y ago
What is work anyway? If you are a programmer then work is different. Sure you are not on your feet all day at the beck and call of customers, however, if you are not working then your computer is. Waiting is not supposed to be part of the job. Learning on the job is also verboten. Very little time that is on the company clock is spent travelling. I have colleagues in sales that do lots of travel, then, when they are back in the office they spend the morning filling in expenses. Sure this is all work that the company needs someone to do and someone has got to go on those planes. I also know from experience that time spent travelling is tiring, but is it strictly work? On the plane they could have the laptop out and be working on spreadsheets. Or they could be playing Angry Birds. Would one activity count as working and the other not? If you are a security guard and are mostly monitoring the TV and kettle, how does that compare to the secretary that occupies the same desk by day, juggling phone calls with a constant stream of people needing assistance? Or if you are a taxi driver working with half the day spent waiting for a fare. You could easily put in long hours doing that but how much of this work is actual work and how much of it is reading the newspaper? With every long hours job in the Western world there are these job-specific factors to consider. If someone is doing extra shifts in a factory where there is a production line then I am far more willing to believe claims of long hours worked.
- badpun 7y ago
  Work is every activity you take to further the goals of your employer. So, traveling is work, waiting for a build is work, learning new tech required for the job is work etc. The caveat is that not all work is equally demanding and tiring - so, if for example your job consists of a lot of travel, you could negotiate a lower hourly rate for the time you spend traveling.
  - FiddlyPack 7y ago
    I think this is a pretty good definition, except that in creative work (like developing a novel application), sleeping often produces some of the best epiphanies/solutions. The truth is this: we have patrons, and our value is not calculable by the hour.
- 7y ago
mwfunk 7y ago
In my experience, when a workplace has a perpetual crunch time culture, little if any additional work gets done that wouldn't have gotten done if everyone stuck to 40 hour weeks. I'm very curious how true this is in 996 places. When someone knows that they're going to spend 12 hours in the office regardless of how much work is actually required, that time gets padded out a LOT with non-work stuff, both to preserve their own sanity and out of resentment for the expectation of 12 hour days.
- danielb12345 7y ago
  I heard from people who work in that culture that it is more for show. Most people still browse YouTube/Reddit and stuff. When everything is an emergency, nothing is an emergency.
  - WalterSear 7y ago
    I've worked in that environment, but without anyone goofing off. Fortunately, as a contractor, I did not have to come in on the weekends. My coworkers were no more productive than me: IMNSHO, they would end up dragging as much busywork out of every problem as they could, simply because they were too overworked to think more than one step ahead. To wit: we were running 10 AWS servers - to serve a mostly static website and handle a few hundred REST API calls each day.
    - marvin 7y ago
      If you can bill $200 per hour for 75 hours a week for a year, though, maybe you'd be willing to do that for a year or so just in order to never have to do it, or any other work, ever again. Of course, if the client actually has to pay $200 per hour you're present, it's exceedingly likely that the overtime culture will stop overnight. It's obvious that it isn't working already, once the company actually pays for it as well, it is bound to stop.
      - kansface 7y ago
        Thats only 750K$ - roughly have the price of a house in the Bay Area before taxes (maybe just enough for the down payment).
osrec 7y ago
Investment bankers will often claim this, while also lying about their salary. I was often surprised by my colleagues claiming extra long work weeks, all while looking remarkable fresh. I couldn't work it out - I mean, if I worked a solid 14 hour day, you could see it clearly on my face, yet if they do it, they seem to develop a healthy glow. Turns out a lot of them were in the building, but not at their desk. Oftentimes they were in the gym/steam/sauna. That explained the healthy glow!
- haolez 7y ago
  On the other side, I know some investment bankers and they work more than 60 hours per week. They look unhealthy to me :)
  - osrec 7y ago
    I too was one of those unhealthy looking, overworked bankers. I was promoted at a young age and had a lot to prove, so I overdid it for a year or two. Then I understood the secret the other MDs had known for years - you just have to look busy, not actually be busy!
    - Thlom 7y ago
      When I was working construction many years ago there was an urban legend about a guy that always looked busy running around with some tools, but no one ever saw him actually working. Turned out he used to find himself a hidden spot at the site and sleep there most of the day. Just making sure to walk across the site with tools once in a while.
      - KC8ZKF 7y ago
        I learned as a young sailor that if you always had a broom in your hand, nobody would find something for you to do.
  - stjohnswarts 7y ago
    I've had lawyer friends like this. Doing law research can drain the soul after about 40 hours a week.
epicureanideal 7y ago
How many hours are people who say they work 40 working?
- pnevares 7y ago
  The answer is part of the first link in the article (37 hours).
- wnissen 7y ago
  That was the most interesting part of the Mother Jones article to me. If you compare people who average 43 hours a week (but claim they are averaging 50), the folks who think they are working 70 should be working about 20 hours more a week. But it's only 12. Pretty amazing. https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/04/most-of-us-dont-work-more-than-40-hours-a-week/ https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/04/most-of-us-do...
  - stjohnswarts 7y ago
    But on average they died within 5 years because of stress/cardio incidends and mcdonald's cheese burger being their primary source of sustenance. So over a 10 year span the normies were 50% more productive.
arosier 7y ago
This happened to me. I was working 40 hours per week but saying I was working 75 hours per week (without really measuring it). Then I got a second job which made it more important to manage my time effectively (including measuring my time). With the second job, I actually started working 72 hours per week and realized how hard it is to work that much time due to the necessities in life (sleeping, eating/shopping, bathing, commuting, ect) not to mention all the distractions that come up during work when you think you have more then 40 hours to complete all your work. I recommend anyone try to work that much for a few months, it really puts perspective on how limited our time is and the value of time management.
- notfromhere 7y ago
  Also puts into perspective how much of a mental wear working 70+ hours is. I did it for a few months - really starts breaking you down as a human being.
  - Gibbon1 7y ago
    30 years ago I did 70 hours a week for 12 weeks and have RSI in one of my wrists as a result.
- yeukhon 7y ago
  I used to really work 70-100 hours of week. You would see me responding to Nagios emails at 3am. Mind we didn’t use PagerDuty. I enjoyed it because I had nothing to do outside of work. After three years I ended up choosing a different job and have a better wlb.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
yibg 7y ago
Many years ago I was working for a small consulting firm and had a stretch of time with a lot of overtime; aka "crunch time". Since these were billable hours, time was tracked daily, even if they weren't all actually billed. The tracked hours varied over the ~6 month span, but ranged from 55 hours a week to 93 for one week. Of course not 100% of the time was spent on actual work but it was pretty close. The 93 hour week was pretty much: go to work, eat meals at desk, go home, work from home until bed time, go to sleep, then repeat. But in general weird things happened during that time, probably due to a combination of stress and unhealthy habits. For example: - I've never been a morning person and struggled to wake up before 9 all my life. During this time I woke up early to meet with the client early in the morning. After some time I'd habitually wake up 15 minutes before 6, which was when my alarm was set at. Also due to lack of sleep I'd always be pissed that I was missing out on 15 minutes of sleep too. - I was sleep deprived but didn't feel sleepy at all during the day. Granted I did consume a lot of coffee, but still. Adrenaline? - Got drunk really easily. Part of client facing work is drinks with clients every so often. I used to be able to drink 4-5 beers and not show much effect externally. Towards the end of this period 1-2 drinks and I'd be slurring. - Perversely, things were often times "fun". The team got really close to each other and we actually looked forward to going to the client office to do "battle". Definitely not sustainable nor healthy. I got pats on the back and some token raises / bonuses but I've since learned that going above and beyond like this is not worth it. The hit to mental and physical health is just not worth the small amount of extra money and (possibly) career advancement.
- hobs 7y ago
  Very common to have an "in the trenches" mentality and to even miss it - the shared stress and common purpose drives people close together, but mostly for the wrong reasons. I still am actively in contact with the people from "that job" and never made as strong of a bond with others, but I still wouldn't go back.
  - yibg 7y ago
    I agree and it's similar for me. The closest work friends I have are from this company and formed during this period. 5+ years later and we still have regular gatherings. Of course the topic of conversation inevitably drift back to when we worked together and specifically during this period. A bit of silver lining in all this I guess, the friendships that have formed.
smallgovt 7y ago
The nature of this topic is that: - Those who don't work long hours will want to understate how many hours hard workers work (to avoid being labelled a slacker) - Those who do work long hours will want to overstate how many hours they work (to accrue more perceived clout) The reality is almost certainly in between. There are certainly people who both claim and do work 75+ hour weeks on a persistent basis. I've done this for 4.5 years straight as a founder.
bob33212 7y ago
People like this generally consider seat and monitor warming as work. Is a butt keeping the seat warm and the mouse moving enough to keep the computer from going to sleep? If so, it is work.
deadbunny 7y ago
I recently started turning up at around 10 and leaving at 4:45 and I get just as much done as when I was in the office 9-6. I've also started giving more fucks about work, which is amusing as I started showing up late and leaving early due to my lack of fucks. So in my unsanctioned (and I'm sure time limited once someone complains) experiment with a sample size of one I can say shorter days definitely keep me more engaged and don't seem to slow down my work.
- war1025 7y ago
  This has been my standard work day for ~4 years. I've found people don't complain as long as you get things done.
  - osrec 7y ago
    If you work in a large corporate, people will complain, especially if you get this done. It sorta highlights the inefficiencies of the punctual, yet less productive employees, and they don't like it.
- throwaway123032 7y ago
  Well make that two. When I got almost fired in one job, my consultancy firm asked me to return to the same client, same team, same job but in another program, I clocked the least (not giving a fuck), but I was the most productive (giving a fuck, does it make sense?:D ) and basically the program director was basing all decision on my feedbacks. It drove the previous team mad, and current one a bit speechless :D
- anitil 7y ago
  Just a quick warning - I've heard plenty of people complain that once they ran out of their allotted fucks at work, they ended up getting promoted. Apparently speaking your mind does that sometimes. So beware.
cascom 7y ago
Seems to me that people tend to get anchored by their high-water marks rather than average... for example I will definitely have 110hr weeks and have the occasional 35hr weeks, my "generic" week is probably 55hrs, but not sure where the true average is (probably closer to the generic week), but the mean of my extremely good weeks and bad weeks is 72.5 hrs...
yingw787 7y ago
I think selling time for money, more than anything, is why I don't want to be an employee forever. It's good for learning the ropes and knowing what it's like in the trenches, but ultimately there are only so many hours in the day and the human body evolved to require a good number of hours for self-maintenance. The path to sustainable growth is through automation, increasing your market rates/prices/value, and owning capital (money and assets that generate more money/assets). You can see this analogy play out on an international scale during the Cold War. The Soviet Union reached its peak during the 1970s, where it could not find any more resources (whether labor or raw materials) to use. "They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work" is a famous Soviet joke. The U.S., by contrast, invented new blue oceans of productivity (e.g. computers) and increased GDP and GDP per capita. It played out in foreign policy; the U.S. invested in and traded with Western Europe to make it more productive; the Soviet Union cannibalized Eastern Europe for parts. The result was that the U.S. won the Cold War and the Soviet Union died. At no scale does throwing more resources at a problem change the nature of the game. Devising more efficient ways to use the resources you have changes the game.
pattisapu 7y ago
Interesting caveat that people also overestimate leisure time. I suppose the takeaway may simply be that people are not good at remembering/estimating quantities of time?
bitL 7y ago
I think 75+ productive hours are doable if: 1) you start early 2) keep focus 100%, no browsing/distractions etc. 3) after 7 hours you make a 2-3h long break and do something completely different, like taking a walk outside, sunbathing, biking, sauna or whatever makes you happy 4) when you return, you work on another task/for another company, never the same stuff you worked on in the morning 5) you take only one day off, i.e. depending on your location/culture/religion one of Fri-Sun is strictly no-work 6) you are single & healthy
- munk-a 7y ago
  Why do you want to work 75+ hours? What are you working for - what value are you receiving from life? These are serious questions, I've worked crazy overtime (defined by me as anything over 50 hours a week) and never want to return to it, consistently doing 10 hour days is draining and significantly lowered my productivity, it was just bad times all around.
  - bitL 7y ago
    I managed to work like that for ~9 months; when you work on some bleeding edge stuff like inventing some new Deep Learning method you can actually have fun and be eager to keep doing it. If it's just usual treadmill caused by silly decisions from the top and inability to push back to customer, then it's hell.
    - stjohnswarts 7y ago
      that type of work is < 0.1% for most of the use cases we're talking about here. Generally it's just a huge corp abusing their employees.
      - bitL 7y ago
        Sure. I summarized rules that helped me when I needed to do that. Somebody might find that useful (e.g. while starting their own business or going through exponential growth).
  - 7y ago
polote 7y ago
In the last year, I had two jobs,one at the office, and one at a startup I was working with. I managed to make more than 75h a weeks only 3 weeks of the year. During these weeks, my life was, sleep, go to the gym, go to work, go to second work sleep, every weekday, and on week-ends gym + work. 75h per week is 11h per day EVERY day. when you do that, your body is tired, and if you want to be productive your have to sleep a lot, and you have no social life. (I track my time with an app, so it is not fake numbers, my max is 78 hours)
maxgiraldo 7y ago
Hours spent at the office do not equate to hours worked.
luminati 7y ago
Well Marissa Mayers claims to have worked 130 hour work weeks[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/yahoo-ceo-marissa-mayer-on-130-hour-work-weeks-2016-8 https://www.businessinsider.com/yahoo-ceo-marissa-mayer-on-1...
- seppin 7y ago
  > "the hardest working CEO in Silicon Valley, bar none." i'm sorry but she was early stage at Google, what since then has all that hard work gotten her?
  - airstrike 7y ago
    Damn near bankrupting Yahoo!
  - coryrc 7y ago
    hundreds of millions of dollars?
impostir 7y ago
I know my productivity plummets passed 7-8 hours of work. Many times I would say it becomes negative, I.e. I make a lot of sigbificant mistakes and/or break something. More work is rarely an actual solution.
danieltillett 7y ago
I worked for a period of my life (around two years) a sustained 100+ hour workload (real work). I literally did nothing but work, eat and work, and sleep seven days a week. The only times I didn’t work was in the bathroom. I didn’t get physically ill or burn out, but I slowly started to drift away from reality. The quality of my judgment calls started to decline and while never doing anything outright crazy, I did and said things that in hindsight were very strange. One of the side effects of this is I had no idea what happened in the world in that time. To this day I am still learning about historical events that happened in that two year period that continue to amaze me.
neilv 7y ago
Some kinds of work are easier to do than others. At one point, I decided that 60 hr/wk of active work seemed the approximate sustainable limit for some typical mix of both hard&easy work, over a period of weeks or months. But even if you can schedule the hard&easy parts for fatigue, 60 hr/wk still has extra costs (e.g., stresses to health, outside relationships, outside activities, internal morale as people get irritable). I've also done my share of all-nighters and 80-hour weeks, and it's rarely/never worth every hour. I've learned to manage projects and tasks better. I also have some sense of how performance degrades severely by the 30 hours awake mark, and a sense that there's a ramp up to that impairment before it becomes obvious. Most recently, I advised a developer to try for 40 productive hours of work per week, and to emphasize being sharp and non-fatigued for any task that would benefit from that. Almost all of their work required them to be sharp. Keep the 60-hour heroics in reserve for emergencies only. (Or for occasional easy flow work, like sketching out a UI skeleton in some new framework. But don't work all night on something easy, and then throw off your sleep cycle for a week when you need to be sharp for harder stuff.) (The last time I did a weekend work marathon, which required some meticulous reverse-engineering-ish work that I think was already the work-smarter way and couldn't be sped up further, I imagined the focus and pace of an astronaut who was calm and all-business about solving some critical problem in time. That was both inspirational and also set a simple internal watchdog on my mood and how progress was going. Had I been burning stressful 60-hour weeks for months before, I might've been too fatigued/stressed to pull it off without error or poor decisions. Had I not had much experience with working long hours, I might not have appreciated how much discipline they require, and the costs.)
jnbiche 7y ago
I worked 60-70 hours a week for 6 months and destroyed by health (actually programming for 50+ of those hours, tracked time since it was billable hours for a consulting firm). Finished the project by the deadline I was hired for, but quit soon afterwards and within 2 months I was in the ICU, and then in and out of the hospital several times with some serious chronic health issues that I'm still recovering from 2 years later. I made a lot of money but spent the next year barely working and recovering my health. Doctor's weren't 100% sure it was stress/work related("possible" it contributed), but I was pretty sure. All things considered, it was a losing option despite the pay. I could have done it at age 25 but not at age 45. Now I work 40-50 hours and week, make even more money(for where I live, average by SV standards), but it's still a high pressure job. I'd gladly work 25 hours a week for 1/3 the pay. Why isn't there someone disrupting software development paying experienced people like me a low salary for 20-30 hours a week? I'd still get over half as much done as I do working 50 hours a week, I'm sure.
- Retric 7y ago
  Communication overhead is a major limitation when growing team sizes.
- alexpetralia 7y ago
  I have no idea why this isn't more common. You basically get _huge experience_ for 10-20 hours a week and you don't have to shell out that cost at 40 hours a week. I believe there are many people who don't mind working an extra 10-20 hours a week. Yes, they may not be your Googlers, but there is still a lot of talent/experience you are able to access without breaking the bank. (Yes, there are also non-compete agreements and various types of reasons why this doesn't work, but I maintain that many experienced devs wouldn't mind working on projects in their spare time and leading/learning/getting paid for it.)
- otakucode 7y ago
  >Why isn't there someone disrupting software development paying experienced people like me a low salary for 20-30 hours a week? I've wondered this for quite awhile myself. Many companies would benefit from being able to keep software developers "on retainer" like a lawyer even. That sort of arrangement might mitigate the cycle of a product becoming excellent, and then immediately starting to go down hill because the company feels compelled to make the developers do something. I'm not confident it would help as you would still face managers who want to 'make a name for themselves' pioneering changes just to get some credit regardless of how beneficial the users would find it. My personal theory on the matter is that it's a combination of "this is just how things are done", lingering influence of the Protestant Work Ethic, and managers who measure their personal and organizational value based upon how many people they control and how much they control them. It's always good to keep in mind that the 40 hour work week and the way work, offices, and much else in society is structured was optimized for very predictable constant physical labor in manufacturing. It was never meant to be used for mental labor or intellectual pursuits at all. We're still adapting to pure mental work being the most valuable sort of work to society. We haven't dealt with things like human beings having much different capacities for extended exertion between physical and mental types. We recognize an awful lot of problems (the destructive nature of interruptions, the diminished returns of long work days, etc) but there are very few organizations dedicating themselves to finding working solutions.
cletus 7y ago
So this is something you learn sooner or later. People lie. And I don't mean maliciously. I mean they lie to themselves and to other people. Some prime examples: - How much they get paid. Honestly you need to see a W2 before you believe what anyone tells you. - Commute times. "It's 15 minutes door to door". No, it's not. It's like 35. This isn't even a "perfect circumstances" type deal. I honestly don't know what this is but it's so common for me to hear outright falsehoods for this I just take any estimate and double it and then go from there. - How much they work. Most people who work 70, 80 or 100 hours a week just don't. I mean they may work a lot but not that much. Kudos to this study for using a diary allocating time rather than self-reporting. - The article mentions this one but I'd forgotten about it: how much people go to the gym and how long they spend there. There's a weirdly large amount of self-delusion and presenting a particular image that honestly I could never be bothered with (which isn't to say I don't have my own foibles of course). Sometimes I wonder what I missed out on here in terms of social norms. But it just seems so exhausting and pointless.
sys_64738 7y ago
50 hours? I work to live and value my free time. Avoid the water cooler talk and stick to 40 hours a week. Non work chatter with co-workers is what slows you up.
rjblackman 7y ago
I've noticed quite a few very unproductive workers, send emails and pretend they are working at 11pm kind of hours. Worker output is the only thing that matters. The problem is in our field how do we measure this?
croh 7y ago
When I got my first job, I did similar. 9 am to 2 am straight for 2 weeks with 6-days week. Reaching home back around 3.30 am. Then waking up at 7.30 am and reaching office again at 9 am. I was replacement for senior dev, who was leaving on very short notice. Noticeably, I used to eat very little than usual. Caffeine and nicotine helped me go thr' it. But now I feel like stupid for being so naive that time.
agumonkey 7y ago
There's something about work.. I always felt better at low level producing jobs (bakery, burgery) because I knew that my work was quantifiable (and predictable). It felt like a robot to many but to me it felt like the difference between superstition and arithmetic. There I couldn't say I worked N but in reality only worked M because there was no way to be confused; it was obvious and there were traces of my work that were function of time.
warp_factor 7y ago
I met a couple subgroup of people that were weirdly proud of working a lot. And I caught a lot of them inflating their work hours (for example pretending they work 70 while they work a normal 40). To them it was a way to show off how important they supposedly are. I really think that most people that pretend to work > 40 hours a week are not really working those hours. They might stay a lot at the office but are usually the least productive people ever
speedplane 7y ago
I used to be a practicing attorney, where we tracked our time meticulously. My craziest month was 360 hours. I remember it well, I didn't cheat on a single hour, if anything I may have under-reported. That was a hell-month, but I do think many other people could do it for one month. I later started a company, where I also worked insanely hard, but did not keep track of my hours. The big difference is that with my startup, I loved every second of it. On countless nights, I would get upset whenever I saw the sun start to rise because it meant I probably ought to go to sleep soon. Five hours can go by without looking up from what you're doing. All that said, without a time sheet, it's impossible to know for certain which job I worked more hours.
nprateem 7y ago
I've recently been working a lot, but not all of it has been desk time. I think it's fair to include time spent thinking about work as work time - once I've worked out how to solve a task I can churn it out, but something particularly complicated might take a few days of thinking (fast and slow) to work out. A survey like the one in the article may be too simplistic because I could be in the gym while mulling over a problem, out for a walk, doing my shopping, playing games, etc. but in the background I'm still mulling things over. It's not pure relaxation time like when I'm not trying to work something out, but still leads to that "Aha!" moment, even if it happens in the shower or while doing the washing up. I think it's reasonable to include all that thinking time as work time.
- krageon 7y ago
  It's not work time in the sense that you will be paid for it though, which is usually the metric people use. Unless I am missing something.
  - nprateem 7y ago
    True, but then a lot of people in permanent jobs don't get paid extra for overtime anyway. I mean it more from the perspective of how much of your day you're "on", and that leisure/other activities aren't necessarily mutually exclusive to thinking about work related tasks, which can make you more productive during your usual paid hours.
    - krageon 7y ago
      > True, but then a lot of people in permanent jobs don't get paid extra for overtime anyway. Can you specify what countr(y|ies) this applies to? It is most certainly not the case where I am. > I mean it more from the perspective of how much of your day you're "on" I'm firmly of the belief that if you spend a lot of your leisure time thinking about work, perhaps you have an unhealthy work/life balance. You are of course correct that it is possible to still do so. I don't agree with the point that this should be counted or even is work time. It is free time you have sacrificed to your job, without compensation. Work with no compensation doesn't satisfy the conditions for what I consider to be employment.
biql 7y ago
Isn't it weird to lie about how long you sit on your butt? I could understand lying about output of your work. But hours? The perception is that it doesn't matter what you did, but rather, how much you suffered for it.
stjohnswarts 7y ago
I have worked 75 hour weeks but only like a couple times a year, people who say they work that much are usually filling their time with worthless filler. I bet less that 1% of them actually do it. The rest is meetings, web surfing, wasting time on the phone. However business owners can easily do this when profits are down.

377 points by ekovarski 7y ago

Actually working more than ~55 hours in a week is soul crushing and physically very hard. At a certain point you would need an escalation of stimulants or risk not being able to get out of bed if you actually worked 75 hours.

ska 7y ago
Hence some of the dysfunction in medicine.
- ridgewell 7y ago
  Medicine is an interesting case. The prioritization isn't so much on the health of medical practitioners and nurses, but on patient safety. It is argued that patients have higher survivability rates when patient handoffs/shift changes are kept to a minimum. The focus has never been on the health of doctors, nurses, X-Ray technicians, etc. but from a public health perspective. This has far-reaching consequences in itself.
  - Scoundreller 7y ago
    The nurses may be working 12 hour shifts, but they’re unlikely to work more than 4 in a week. Overtime is expensive for employers, so they prefer to hire more or hire contract nurses where necessary. Even the doctors usually cover 12 clinical 12hr shifts a month. They may do more work after another takes over, academic work, moonlight, or have admin work. And having a good income allows you to buy your way out of most modern problems/work, like comparison shopping, cleaning, or even having and then raising their children for them.
    - kelnos 7y ago
      A friend of mine who is a nurse tells me that she's at the hospital an hour before her shift starts (in order to prep) and is there a good hour after her shift ends (in order to help prep the next shift). So she's effectively working nearly 14 hours a day, even though she only works 3-4 consecutive days. I stretches credibility to me that people can keep up a high quality of work for 14 hours straight, even with a 3 day break every 3-4 days.
    - RHSeeger 7y ago
      > The nurses may be working 12 hour shifts, but they’re unlikely to work more than 4 in a week. Overtime is expensive for employers, so they prefer to hire more or hire contract nurses where necessary. Or they're picking up more hours at a different hospital, so there's no overtime but they still make more.
  - ska 7y ago
    Yes, I've heard that argument before. I've asked before if the research shows the problem is handoffs per se, or the protocol around them, but haven't had a good answer. There also doesn't seem to be good research into the longer term impact of these negative consequences on the practitioners. I've worked around clinicians and clinical staff, and several times been surprised how much is left to personal memory and scheduling, including some inherently risky protocols/procedures that are at all functional only because the people doing them are careful ... some of these obviously easily improvable.
    - kelnos 7y ago
      I have several friends who are doctors or nurses, and have talked with most of them about this. They all parrot the "doctor/nurse-patient continuity" line, but when pressed as to whether fewer handoffs actually outweigh the effects of exhaustion on outcomes, they all seem to take it as a given that it does, without being able to support it. I suspect that, even if fewer handoffs does take an edge over exhaustion, the handoff process could be improved greatly; from what I'm told, handoff processes vary wildly, often aren't formalized, and even when they are, adherence to process is pretty lax, in part due to the effects of exhaustion.
      - ska 7y ago
        It’s really interesting to do workflow analysis in clinical settings. It’s not uncommon to run into “we do it this way because that’s the way we’ve always done it” situations. There is also a bit of machismo/pride for the shifts worked thing, which isn’t helpful.
  - tonyedgecombe 7y ago
    I've just been reading Why we sleep by Matthew Walker. In it he mentions doctors will on average kill one patient during their residency due to sleep deprivation.
darkr 7y ago
In my personal and subjective experience, working beyond 55 hours in a week is very doable... But it's absolutely not sustainable. I've found that doing it for more than 2-3 weeks in a row will generally result in declining productivity and burnout after that, requiring 2-3 weeks of 0-30 hour work weeks afterwards to recover. Some hard learned lessons that I now adhere to: * Don't push past 50 hours a week regularly * If you do, cut your hours down to below 40 the following week, or even take some days off * Take at least one full weekend off at least once per month
mdorazio 7y ago
I can confirm. In the consulting world I've had several instances of either being doubled up on projects or having to hit extremely demanding deadlines for milestone payouts that required legitimate 60+ hour weeks. One week is doable, 2 is a stretch, beyond that people (myself included) generally had to turn to things like modafinil to keep going and there's a noticeable toll on general health and wellness. On the flip side, people who say they work stupid hours are usually just at the office stupid hours, not necessarily working all the time. But so are people who say they work 40 hour weeks. From working with hundreds of "normal" employees at clients over the years, I'd say the average actual productive time per person is around 25 hours.
- okmokmz 7y ago
  >But so are people who say they work 40 hour weeks. From working with hundreds of "normal" employees at clients over the years, I'd say the average actual productive time per person is around 25 hours Agreed, I'd be surprised if I spent more than 25 hours a week actually actively working
bluGill 7y ago
I have found that I have 35 hours of good code in me per week. I make sure that I average at least 1 hour a day for meetings just so I can hit my 40 hour mark (this isn't hard). I can work more hours for a couple weeks if needed, but my quality goes down a little each week.
stjohnswarts 7y ago
40 hours is enough for me.

bryanlarsen 7y ago

And even if they do spend 75 hours at their workplace, they're probably spending far less than 40 actually working. (says the guy posting on HN instead of actually working).

Matticus_Rex 7y ago
Also true of people who spend 40 hours at their workplace, which is totally fine (and often necessary!) for most knowledge work.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
seppin 7y ago
> And even if they do spend 75 hours at their workplace, they're probably spending far less than 40 actually working. Interesting, in Europe the hours are less but you are expected to work every minute you are there. In America you are expected to physically stay longer but being on FB/Reddit is no big deal. Sounds like a bad way of doing things.
- balfirevic 7y ago
  > Interesting, in Europe the hours are less but you are expected to work every minute you are there. No, you're not. Also, Europe is large and diverse. Source: European.
  - cocochanel 7y ago
    Seconded from another European. HN and Reddit are big chunks of the work day. Heck, people even watch YouTube.
  - drilldrive 7y ago
    Most people unfortunately refer to Europe when they mean north-west Europe or even the Nordic countries alone.

S_A_P 7y ago

I’m currently working legit 65-70 hours per week. We have a hard stop that costs millions if we miss. It basically means 6am-6pm Monday through Saturday. I’m not as productive as when I work less but there is a net win in productivity. I don’t think I can do this for much more than a few months. I can already tell it has markedly harmed my health. Being stressed for months at a time is hard.

ridgewell 7y ago
People like to bring up the long hours that workers in Asian countries stay in the office or workplace for to justify long work weeks in North America and Europe when needed. In practice, they drag out their work day (eat breakfast, take showers, go to the gym, go on their phone) and don't really work significant hours in the end. Their productivity in terms of economic value produced per hour is markedly lower than most western countries. [1] Doing real work for 65-70 hours is markedly dissimilar and very detrimental to your health. Not even sure if most people could say they could last for a few more months. [1] https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2018/09/11/commentary/japan-commentary/omotenashi-underlies-japans-low-economic-productivity/ https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2018/09/11/commentary/j...
- notfromhere 7y ago
  You can't. After a few solid months of 70 hour weeks you start seeing some serious health effects (blood pressure spikes, nervous system issues triggered by high levels of persistent stress, insomnia, exhaustion, etc).
  - smallgovt 7y ago
    This is quite a generalization. It depends on how much you value and enjoy your work. And, every person's limit is different. There exist people on both extremes.
    - kelnos 7y ago
      It's a generalization that the data seems to support. Sure, there are always outliers, but in general, 70+ hours per week over several weeks to months will severely damage your health. Note that we're talking about 70 hours of actual work. Being in the office for 70 hours but only working 50 hours is what's more common, and doesn't cause the same hit to your health.

secfirstmd 7y ago

I recently starting using a training a productivity tracker that has a decent mix of tracking but keeping the data local. It's really amazing to see how time is spent in the office. If on a very unusual and rare day of say 10 hours, I might be lucky to get 6 hours of actual work (with maybe an hour of deep work in there).

drjesusphd 7y ago
What software is this productivity tracker?
- secfirstmd 7y ago
  Qbserve
  - nullandvoid 7y ago
    Thanks this sounds like something I'd like to try - are there any others you considered whilst looking around as that is mac only and I'm Windows unfltunately ( or any one else in this thread do something similar )
    - Noumenon72 7y ago
      I'm using Timeular which is an octahedron with erasable sides. It tracks whichever side is facing up. You just have to remember to flip it, which is a good way to notice 'hey, should I really be switching tasks'?
    - secfirstmd 7y ago
      Yes I think I remember RescueTime but that doesn't store your data locally I think?

Theodores 7y ago

What is work anyway? If you are a programmer then work is different. Sure you are not on your feet all day at the beck and call of customers, however, if you are not working then your computer is. Waiting is not supposed to be part of the job. Learning on the job is also verboten. Very little time that is on the company clock is spent travelling. I have colleagues in sales that do lots of travel, then, when they are back in the office they spend the morning filling in expenses. Sure this is all work that the company needs someone to do and someone has got to go on those planes. I also know from experience that time spent travelling is tiring, but is it strictly work? On the plane they could have the laptop out and be working on spreadsheets. Or they could be playing Angry Birds. Would one activity count as working and the other not? If you are a security guard and are mostly monitoring the TV and kettle, how does that compare to the secretary that occupies the same desk by day, juggling phone calls with a constant stream of people needing assistance? Or if you are a taxi driver working with half the day spent waiting for a fare. You could easily put in long hours doing that but how much of this work is actual work and how much of it is reading the newspaper? With every long hours job in the Western world there are these job-specific factors to consider. If someone is doing extra shifts in a factory where there is a production line then I am far more willing to believe claims of long hours worked.

badpun 7y ago
Work is every activity you take to further the goals of your employer. So, traveling is work, waiting for a build is work, learning new tech required for the job is work etc. The caveat is that not all work is equally demanding and tiring - so, if for example your job consists of a lot of travel, you could negotiate a lower hourly rate for the time you spend traveling.
- FiddlyPack 7y ago
  I think this is a pretty good definition, except that in creative work (like developing a novel application), sleeping often produces some of the best epiphanies/solutions. The truth is this: we have patrons, and our value is not calculable by the hour.
7y ago

mwfunk 7y ago

In my experience, when a workplace has a perpetual crunch time culture, little if any additional work gets done that wouldn't have gotten done if everyone stuck to 40 hour weeks. I'm very curious how true this is in 996 places. When someone knows that they're going to spend 12 hours in the office regardless of how much work is actually required, that time gets padded out a LOT with non-work stuff, both to preserve their own sanity and out of resentment for the expectation of 12 hour days.

danielb12345 7y ago
I heard from people who work in that culture that it is more for show. Most people still browse YouTube/Reddit and stuff. When everything is an emergency, nothing is an emergency.
- WalterSear 7y ago
  I've worked in that environment, but without anyone goofing off. Fortunately, as a contractor, I did not have to come in on the weekends. My coworkers were no more productive than me: IMNSHO, they would end up dragging as much busywork out of every problem as they could, simply because they were too overworked to think more than one step ahead. To wit: we were running 10 AWS servers - to serve a mostly static website and handle a few hundred REST API calls each day.
  - marvin 7y ago
    If you can bill $200 per hour for 75 hours a week for a year, though, maybe you'd be willing to do that for a year or so just in order to never have to do it, or any other work, ever again. Of course, if the client actually has to pay $200 per hour you're present, it's exceedingly likely that the overtime culture will stop overnight. It's obvious that it isn't working already, once the company actually pays for it as well, it is bound to stop.
    - kansface 7y ago
      Thats only 750K$ - roughly have the price of a house in the Bay Area before taxes (maybe just enough for the down payment).

osrec 7y ago

Investment bankers will often claim this, while also lying about their salary. I was often surprised by my colleagues claiming extra long work weeks, all while looking remarkable fresh. I couldn't work it out - I mean, if I worked a solid 14 hour day, you could see it clearly on my face, yet if they do it, they seem to develop a healthy glow. Turns out a lot of them were in the building, but not at their desk. Oftentimes they were in the gym/steam/sauna. That explained the healthy glow!

haolez 7y ago
On the other side, I know some investment bankers and they work more than 60 hours per week. They look unhealthy to me :)
- osrec 7y ago
  I too was one of those unhealthy looking, overworked bankers. I was promoted at a young age and had a lot to prove, so I overdid it for a year or two. Then I understood the secret the other MDs had known for years - you just have to look busy, not actually be busy!
  - Thlom 7y ago
    When I was working construction many years ago there was an urban legend about a guy that always looked busy running around with some tools, but no one ever saw him actually working. Turned out he used to find himself a hidden spot at the site and sleep there most of the day. Just making sure to walk across the site with tools once in a while.
    - KC8ZKF 7y ago
      I learned as a young sailor that if you always had a broom in your hand, nobody would find something for you to do.
- stjohnswarts 7y ago
  I've had lawyer friends like this. Doing law research can drain the soul after about 40 hours a week.

epicureanideal 7y ago

How many hours are people who say they work 40 working?

pnevares 7y ago
The answer is part of the first link in the article (37 hours).
wnissen 7y ago
That was the most interesting part of the Mother Jones article to me. If you compare people who average 43 hours a week (but claim they are averaging 50), the folks who think they are working 70 should be working about 20 hours more a week. But it's only 12. Pretty amazing. https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/04/most-of-us-dont-work-more-than-40-hours-a-week/ https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/04/most-of-us-do...
- stjohnswarts 7y ago
  But on average they died within 5 years because of stress/cardio incidends and mcdonald's cheese burger being their primary source of sustenance. So over a 10 year span the normies were 50% more productive.

arosier 7y ago

This happened to me. I was working 40 hours per week but saying I was working 75 hours per week (without really measuring it). Then I got a second job which made it more important to manage my time effectively (including measuring my time). With the second job, I actually started working 72 hours per week and realized how hard it is to work that much time due to the necessities in life (sleeping, eating/shopping, bathing, commuting, ect) not to mention all the distractions that come up during work when you think you have more then 40 hours to complete all your work. I recommend anyone try to work that much for a few months, it really puts perspective on how limited our time is and the value of time management.

notfromhere 7y ago
Also puts into perspective how much of a mental wear working 70+ hours is. I did it for a few months - really starts breaking you down as a human being.
- Gibbon1 7y ago
  30 years ago I did 70 hours a week for 12 weeks and have RSI in one of my wrists as a result.
yeukhon 7y ago
I used to really work 70-100 hours of week. You would see me responding to Nagios emails at 3am. Mind we didn’t use PagerDuty. I enjoyed it because I had nothing to do outside of work. After three years I ended up choosing a different job and have a better wlb.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

yibg 7y ago

Many years ago I was working for a small consulting firm and had a stretch of time with a lot of overtime; aka "crunch time". Since these were billable hours, time was tracked daily, even if they weren't all actually billed. The tracked hours varied over the ~6 month span, but ranged from 55 hours a week to 93 for one week. Of course not 100% of the time was spent on actual work but it was pretty close. The 93 hour week was pretty much: go to work, eat meals at desk, go home, work from home until bed time, go to sleep, then repeat. But in general weird things happened during that time, probably due to a combination of stress and unhealthy habits. For example: - I've never been a morning person and struggled to wake up before 9 all my life. During this time I woke up early to meet with the client early in the morning. After some time I'd habitually wake up 15 minutes before 6, which was when my alarm was set at. Also due to lack of sleep I'd always be pissed that I was missing out on 15 minutes of sleep too. - I was sleep deprived but didn't feel sleepy at all during the day. Granted I did consume a lot of coffee, but still. Adrenaline? - Got drunk really easily. Part of client facing work is drinks with clients every so often. I used to be able to drink 4-5 beers and not show much effect externally. Towards the end of this period 1-2 drinks and I'd be slurring. - Perversely, things were often times "fun". The team got really close to each other and we actually looked forward to going to the client office to do "battle". Definitely not sustainable nor healthy. I got pats on the back and some token raises / bonuses but I've since learned that going above and beyond like this is not worth it. The hit to mental and physical health is just not worth the small amount of extra money and (possibly) career advancement.

hobs 7y ago
Very common to have an "in the trenches" mentality and to even miss it - the shared stress and common purpose drives people close together, but mostly for the wrong reasons. I still am actively in contact with the people from "that job" and never made as strong of a bond with others, but I still wouldn't go back.
- yibg 7y ago
  I agree and it's similar for me. The closest work friends I have are from this company and formed during this period. 5+ years later and we still have regular gatherings. Of course the topic of conversation inevitably drift back to when we worked together and specifically during this period. A bit of silver lining in all this I guess, the friendships that have formed.

smallgovt 7y ago

The nature of this topic is that: - Those who don't work long hours will want to understate how many hours hard workers work (to avoid being labelled a slacker) - Those who do work long hours will want to overstate how many hours they work (to accrue more perceived clout) The reality is almost certainly in between. There are certainly people who both claim and do work 75+ hour weeks on a persistent basis. I've done this for 4.5 years straight as a founder.

bob33212 7y ago

People like this generally consider seat and monitor warming as work. Is a butt keeping the seat warm and the mouse moving enough to keep the computer from going to sleep? If so, it is work.

deadbunny 7y ago

I recently started turning up at around 10 and leaving at 4:45 and I get just as much done as when I was in the office 9-6. I've also started giving more fucks about work, which is amusing as I started showing up late and leaving early due to my lack of fucks. So in my unsanctioned (and I'm sure time limited once someone complains) experiment with a sample size of one I can say shorter days definitely keep me more engaged and don't seem to slow down my work.

war1025 7y ago
This has been my standard work day for ~4 years. I've found people don't complain as long as you get things done.
- osrec 7y ago
  If you work in a large corporate, people will complain, especially if you get this done. It sorta highlights the inefficiencies of the punctual, yet less productive employees, and they don't like it.
throwaway123032 7y ago
Well make that two. When I got almost fired in one job, my consultancy firm asked me to return to the same client, same team, same job but in another program, I clocked the least (not giving a fuck), but I was the most productive (giving a fuck, does it make sense?:D ) and basically the program director was basing all decision on my feedbacks. It drove the previous team mad, and current one a bit speechless :D
anitil 7y ago
Just a quick warning - I've heard plenty of people complain that once they ran out of their allotted fucks at work, they ended up getting promoted. Apparently speaking your mind does that sometimes. So beware.

cascom 7y ago

Seems to me that people tend to get anchored by their high-water marks rather than average... for example I will definitely have 110hr weeks and have the occasional 35hr weeks, my "generic" week is probably 55hrs, but not sure where the true average is (probably closer to the generic week), but the mean of my extremely good weeks and bad weeks is 72.5 hrs...

yingw787 7y ago

I think selling time for money, more than anything, is why I don't want to be an employee forever. It's good for learning the ropes and knowing what it's like in the trenches, but ultimately there are only so many hours in the day and the human body evolved to require a good number of hours for self-maintenance. The path to sustainable growth is through automation, increasing your market rates/prices/value, and owning capital (money and assets that generate more money/assets). You can see this analogy play out on an international scale during the Cold War. The Soviet Union reached its peak during the 1970s, where it could not find any more resources (whether labor or raw materials) to use. "They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work" is a famous Soviet joke. The U.S., by contrast, invented new blue oceans of productivity (e.g. computers) and increased GDP and GDP per capita. It played out in foreign policy; the U.S. invested in and traded with Western Europe to make it more productive; the Soviet Union cannibalized Eastern Europe for parts. The result was that the U.S. won the Cold War and the Soviet Union died. At no scale does throwing more resources at a problem change the nature of the game. Devising more efficient ways to use the resources you have changes the game.

pattisapu 7y ago

Interesting caveat that people also overestimate leisure time. I suppose the takeaway may simply be that people are not good at remembering/estimating quantities of time?

bitL 7y ago

I think 75+ productive hours are doable if: 1) you start early 2) keep focus 100%, no browsing/distractions etc. 3) after 7 hours you make a 2-3h long break and do something completely different, like taking a walk outside, sunbathing, biking, sauna or whatever makes you happy 4) when you return, you work on another task/for another company, never the same stuff you worked on in the morning 5) you take only one day off, i.e. depending on your location/culture/religion one of Fri-Sun is strictly no-work 6) you are single & healthy

munk-a 7y ago
Why do you want to work 75+ hours? What are you working for - what value are you receiving from life? These are serious questions, I've worked crazy overtime (defined by me as anything over 50 hours a week) and never want to return to it, consistently doing 10 hour days is draining and significantly lowered my productivity, it was just bad times all around.
- bitL 7y ago
  I managed to work like that for ~9 months; when you work on some bleeding edge stuff like inventing some new Deep Learning method you can actually have fun and be eager to keep doing it. If it's just usual treadmill caused by silly decisions from the top and inability to push back to customer, then it's hell.
  - stjohnswarts 7y ago
    that type of work is < 0.1% for most of the use cases we're talking about here. Generally it's just a huge corp abusing their employees.
    - bitL 7y ago
      Sure. I summarized rules that helped me when I needed to do that. Somebody might find that useful (e.g. while starting their own business or going through exponential growth).
- 7y ago

polote 7y ago

In the last year, I had two jobs,one at the office, and one at a startup I was working with. I managed to make more than 75h a weeks only 3 weeks of the year. During these weeks, my life was, sleep, go to the gym, go to work, go to second work sleep, every weekday, and on week-ends gym + work. 75h per week is 11h per day EVERY day. when you do that, your body is tired, and if you want to be productive your have to sleep a lot, and you have no social life. (I track my time with an app, so it is not fake numbers, my max is 78 hours)

maxgiraldo 7y ago

Hours spent at the office do not equate to hours worked.

luminati 7y ago

Well Marissa Mayers claims to have worked 130 hour work weeks[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/yahoo-ceo-marissa-mayer-on-130-hour-work-weeks-2016-8 https://www.businessinsider.com/yahoo-ceo-marissa-mayer-on-1...

seppin 7y ago
> "the hardest working CEO in Silicon Valley, bar none." i'm sorry but she was early stage at Google, what since then has all that hard work gotten her?
- airstrike 7y ago
  Damn near bankrupting Yahoo!
- coryrc 7y ago
  hundreds of millions of dollars?

impostir 7y ago

I know my productivity plummets passed 7-8 hours of work. Many times I would say it becomes negative, I.e. I make a lot of sigbificant mistakes and/or break something. More work is rarely an actual solution.

danieltillett 7y ago

I worked for a period of my life (around two years) a sustained 100+ hour workload (real work). I literally did nothing but work, eat and work, and sleep seven days a week. The only times I didn’t work was in the bathroom. I didn’t get physically ill or burn out, but I slowly started to drift away from reality. The quality of my judgment calls started to decline and while never doing anything outright crazy, I did and said things that in hindsight were very strange. One of the side effects of this is I had no idea what happened in the world in that time. To this day I am still learning about historical events that happened in that two year period that continue to amaze me.

neilv 7y ago

Some kinds of work are easier to do than others. At one point, I decided that 60 hr/wk of active work seemed the approximate sustainable limit for some typical mix of both hard&easy work, over a period of weeks or months. But even if you can schedule the hard&easy parts for fatigue, 60 hr/wk still has extra costs (e.g., stresses to health, outside relationships, outside activities, internal morale as people get irritable). I've also done my share of all-nighters and 80-hour weeks, and it's rarely/never worth every hour. I've learned to manage projects and tasks better. I also have some sense of how performance degrades severely by the 30 hours awake mark, and a sense that there's a ramp up to that impairment before it becomes obvious. Most recently, I advised a developer to try for 40 productive hours of work per week, and to emphasize being sharp and non-fatigued for any task that would benefit from that. Almost all of their work required them to be sharp. Keep the 60-hour heroics in reserve for emergencies only. (Or for occasional easy flow work, like sketching out a UI skeleton in some new framework. But don't work all night on something easy, and then throw off your sleep cycle for a week when you need to be sharp for harder stuff.) (The last time I did a weekend work marathon, which required some meticulous reverse-engineering-ish work that I think was already the work-smarter way and couldn't be sped up further, I imagined the focus and pace of an astronaut who was calm and all-business about solving some critical problem in time. That was both inspirational and also set a simple internal watchdog on my mood and how progress was going. Had I been burning stressful 60-hour weeks for months before, I might've been too fatigued/stressed to pull it off without error or poor decisions. Had I not had much experience with working long hours, I might not have appreciated how much discipline they require, and the costs.)

jnbiche 7y ago

I worked 60-70 hours a week for 6 months and destroyed by health (actually programming for 50+ of those hours, tracked time since it was billable hours for a consulting firm). Finished the project by the deadline I was hired for, but quit soon afterwards and within 2 months I was in the ICU, and then in and out of the hospital several times with some serious chronic health issues that I'm still recovering from 2 years later. I made a lot of money but spent the next year barely working and recovering my health. Doctor's weren't 100% sure it was stress/work related("possible" it contributed), but I was pretty sure. All things considered, it was a losing option despite the pay. I could have done it at age 25 but not at age 45. Now I work 40-50 hours and week, make even more money(for where I live, average by SV standards), but it's still a high pressure job. I'd gladly work 25 hours a week for 1/3 the pay. Why isn't there someone disrupting software development paying experienced people like me a low salary for 20-30 hours a week? I'd still get over half as much done as I do working 50 hours a week, I'm sure.

Retric 7y ago
Communication overhead is a major limitation when growing team sizes.
alexpetralia 7y ago
I have no idea why this isn't more common. You basically get _huge experience_ for 10-20 hours a week and you don't have to shell out that cost at 40 hours a week. I believe there are many people who don't mind working an extra 10-20 hours a week. Yes, they may not be your Googlers, but there is still a lot of talent/experience you are able to access without breaking the bank. (Yes, there are also non-compete agreements and various types of reasons why this doesn't work, but I maintain that many experienced devs wouldn't mind working on projects in their spare time and leading/learning/getting paid for it.)
otakucode 7y ago
>Why isn't there someone disrupting software development paying experienced people like me a low salary for 20-30 hours a week? I've wondered this for quite awhile myself. Many companies would benefit from being able to keep software developers "on retainer" like a lawyer even. That sort of arrangement might mitigate the cycle of a product becoming excellent, and then immediately starting to go down hill because the company feels compelled to make the developers do something. I'm not confident it would help as you would still face managers who want to 'make a name for themselves' pioneering changes just to get some credit regardless of how beneficial the users would find it. My personal theory on the matter is that it's a combination of "this is just how things are done", lingering influence of the Protestant Work Ethic, and managers who measure their personal and organizational value based upon how many people they control and how much they control them. It's always good to keep in mind that the 40 hour work week and the way work, offices, and much else in society is structured was optimized for very predictable constant physical labor in manufacturing. It was never meant to be used for mental labor or intellectual pursuits at all. We're still adapting to pure mental work being the most valuable sort of work to society. We haven't dealt with things like human beings having much different capacities for extended exertion between physical and mental types. We recognize an awful lot of problems (the destructive nature of interruptions, the diminished returns of long work days, etc) but there are very few organizations dedicating themselves to finding working solutions.

cletus 7y ago

So this is something you learn sooner or later. People lie. And I don't mean maliciously. I mean they lie to themselves and to other people. Some prime examples: - How much they get paid. Honestly you need to see a W2 before you believe what anyone tells you. - Commute times. "It's 15 minutes door to door". No, it's not. It's like 35. This isn't even a "perfect circumstances" type deal. I honestly don't know what this is but it's so common for me to hear outright falsehoods for this I just take any estimate and double it and then go from there. - How much they work. Most people who work 70, 80 or 100 hours a week just don't. I mean they may work a lot but not that much. Kudos to this study for using a diary allocating time rather than self-reporting. - The article mentions this one but I'd forgotten about it: how much people go to the gym and how long they spend there. There's a weirdly large amount of self-delusion and presenting a particular image that honestly I could never be bothered with (which isn't to say I don't have my own foibles of course). Sometimes I wonder what I missed out on here in terms of social norms. But it just seems so exhausting and pointless.

sys_64738 7y ago

50 hours? I work to live and value my free time. Avoid the water cooler talk and stick to 40 hours a week. Non work chatter with co-workers is what slows you up.

rjblackman 7y ago

I've noticed quite a few very unproductive workers, send emails and pretend they are working at 11pm kind of hours. Worker output is the only thing that matters. The problem is in our field how do we measure this?

croh 7y ago

When I got my first job, I did similar. 9 am to 2 am straight for 2 weeks with 6-days week. Reaching home back around 3.30 am. Then waking up at 7.30 am and reaching office again at 9 am. I was replacement for senior dev, who was leaving on very short notice. Noticeably, I used to eat very little than usual. Caffeine and nicotine helped me go thr' it. But now I feel like stupid for being so naive that time.

agumonkey 7y ago

There's something about work.. I always felt better at low level producing jobs (bakery, burgery) because I knew that my work was quantifiable (and predictable). It felt like a robot to many but to me it felt like the difference between superstition and arithmetic. There I couldn't say I worked N but in reality only worked M because there was no way to be confused; it was obvious and there were traces of my work that were function of time.

warp_factor 7y ago

I met a couple subgroup of people that were weirdly proud of working a lot. And I caught a lot of them inflating their work hours (for example pretending they work 70 while they work a normal 40). To them it was a way to show off how important they supposedly are. I really think that most people that pretend to work > 40 hours a week are not really working those hours. They might stay a lot at the office but are usually the least productive people ever

speedplane 7y ago

I used to be a practicing attorney, where we tracked our time meticulously. My craziest month was 360 hours. I remember it well, I didn't cheat on a single hour, if anything I may have under-reported. That was a hell-month, but I do think many other people could do it for one month. I later started a company, where I also worked insanely hard, but did not keep track of my hours. The big difference is that with my startup, I loved every second of it. On countless nights, I would get upset whenever I saw the sun start to rise because it meant I probably ought to go to sleep soon. Five hours can go by without looking up from what you're doing. All that said, without a time sheet, it's impossible to know for certain which job I worked more hours.

nprateem 7y ago

I've recently been working a lot, but not all of it has been desk time. I think it's fair to include time spent thinking about work as work time - once I've worked out how to solve a task I can churn it out, but something particularly complicated might take a few days of thinking (fast and slow) to work out. A survey like the one in the article may be too simplistic because I could be in the gym while mulling over a problem, out for a walk, doing my shopping, playing games, etc. but in the background I'm still mulling things over. It's not pure relaxation time like when I'm not trying to work something out, but still leads to that "Aha!" moment, even if it happens in the shower or while doing the washing up. I think it's reasonable to include all that thinking time as work time.

krageon 7y ago
It's not work time in the sense that you will be paid for it though, which is usually the metric people use. Unless I am missing something.
- nprateem 7y ago
  True, but then a lot of people in permanent jobs don't get paid extra for overtime anyway. I mean it more from the perspective of how much of your day you're "on", and that leisure/other activities aren't necessarily mutually exclusive to thinking about work related tasks, which can make you more productive during your usual paid hours.
  - krageon 7y ago
    > True, but then a lot of people in permanent jobs don't get paid extra for overtime anyway. Can you specify what countr(y|ies) this applies to? It is most certainly not the case where I am. > I mean it more from the perspective of how much of your day you're "on" I'm firmly of the belief that if you spend a lot of your leisure time thinking about work, perhaps you have an unhealthy work/life balance. You are of course correct that it is possible to still do so. I don't agree with the point that this should be counted or even is work time. It is free time you have sacrificed to your job, without compensation. Work with no compensation doesn't satisfy the conditions for what I consider to be employment.

biql 7y ago

Isn't it weird to lie about how long you sit on your butt? I could understand lying about output of your work. But hours? The perception is that it doesn't matter what you did, but rather, how much you suffered for it.

stjohnswarts 7y ago

I have worked 75 hour weeks but only like a couple times a year, people who say they work that much are usually filling their time with worthless filler. I bet less that 1% of them actually do it. The rest is meetings, web surfing, wasting time on the phone. However business owners can easily do this when profits are down.