11 ms·

I don't believe anyone really does 80 hours. I just don't think it is possible and I don't think you can call sitting at a desk doing nothing "work". I've done

• golergka 7y ago
  I just took a single 29-hour workday, right before a major deadline. And coming up to that, didn't have a single off day whole December, typically working from 2pm to 4am. So yeah, it's definitely possible, but really not good for anyone in the long run.
• Consultant32452 7y ago
  I think some of the people who are making claims of really long hours are using amphetamines or other performance enhancing drugs.
  • whoopsthereis 7y ago
    Or loads of caffeine to the point it is questionable?
    • derision 7y ago
      I would argue one cup of coffee a day every single day is questionable. We shouldn't be drugging ourselves just to reach some arbitrary deadlines
      • late2part 7y ago
        How about LSD, Mushrooms, Ayahuasca, MDMA? Should we be using those to expand perceptions?
      • nwienert 7y ago
        You’re getting downvoted but I strongly believe coffee is a huge net negative on productivity especially in the long run. It has two scary effects: one is it seems to sacrifice some creativity for some raw output (along with a sort of scattered and less human feel to communication). Two is that it degrades sleep quality. Which probably means a lack of memory formation at the margin over long time periods. These are just hunches but people on caffeine just have an attitude that’s a little off putting once you notice it. I’d love to see some big studies that focus on the long term and subtler psych effects.
        • pm90 7y ago
          Hmm, I like coffee very much but I don't really use it to get shit done as much as to open my mind to creative thinking. Perhaps I'm using it differently than most people do? Without coffee, I will feel sluggish and sleepy all morning. With coffee, I feel alert and inquisitive. I have a rule against drinking coffee after noon, so it doesn't affect my sleep patterns. Discovering coffee in college was really what allowed me to read things for long hours. I like the fact that it activates inquisitiveness a lot more than that it enables productivity. This is a purely subjective experience, I admit.
          • nwienert 7y ago
            The reason you feel sluggish and sleepy is because of coffee (your addiction to it), along with perhaps a variety of other imbalances in your diet, sleep or exercise. For most of my adult life I drank coffee, with occasional breaks. When I quit a couple years ago I had what felt like burnout for nearly two months. It took up to 6 months after until I really felt fine within a few minutes of waking up. And now my sleep is far easier and better. Caffeine has a 12 hour half life. That’s incredibly long. Your body is absolutely addicted to it after just a few weeks. Everyone is different. I am more sensitive to caffeine than most. But it’s absolutely not the case that you need coffee to have energy in the morning. Coffee is a bandaid that temporarily fixes a problem by causing imbalance elsewhere. Decaf is wonderful though! All the pleasant taste and routine. Also I find it funny I’m being downvoted given I’m not making scientific claims but rather hypothesis and anecdote. Too many caffeine addicts that don’t want it to be true! Final note. Focus is easy to come by if you have two things: a good environment (quiet, natural) and an interesting problem. I think the reason why everyone is addicted to coffee in tech is similar to why hard laborers get addicted to painkillers: it gets you through the shitty parts of your job. It’s why college kids get addicted to coffee and adderall as well. You’re being forced to do something that’s far outside your interest, and often in a bad environment. Well that, and it’s fun to do a drug that has a “come up” like caffeine. Final final note: caffeine has a very specific effect on your thinking. It’s not a debatable point it’s just true. Look at the spider web experiment. It’s makes you excited certainly, it gives you a rush, but it’s almost like a mania much like other stimulants. The weird thing is it almost doesn’t hurt so much in business because so many people do it, so your clients are often also on the same drug as you.
      • tmpz22 7y ago
        I think caffeine is often used for motivation during mundane tasks. Imagine working on a tedious engineering assignment like writing unit tests for a CRUD app. Over a few years it becomes a necessary lever, and at that point it is pretty close to an addiction. Amount of caffeine consumed by a team may be an interesting proxy for how motivated employees are at a company (a small amount indicates high motivation, a medium amount indicates low motivation, and a high amount indicates either a severe lack of motivation or a high level of motivation).
  • penagwin 7y ago
    I'm diagnosed with ADD and have a prescription for Ritalin/Concerta. I'm a full time programmer, and I think my sustainable "real work and focus" time is max 6 hours. Today looks more like 4. A higher dose does not increase that time, at least for me. I'm curious how those without add/adhd are affected.
    • whatshisface 7y ago
      I've heard from many people that if you're legitimately on the drug the experience is totally different than if you're taking it without a brain chemistry that needs it i.e. as a study drug. I wonder if that means that people who have ADHD could possibly have different or fewer side-effects than people without, if the two groups respond so differently. Are there any large scale studies about the long term health implications of using Adderall or Vivance without having ADHD?
      • hnuser123456 7y ago
        Any of that data is going to be mixed in with any studies on people who were (presumably) correctly diagnosed with attention disorders, because in the US, the "medication" is prescribed at triple the rate of the prevalence of the disorders: 15% vs 5%. Source: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/big-pharma-s-manufactured-epidemic-the-misdiagnosis-of-adhd/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/big-pharma-s-manu... Additionally: being someone who was misdiagnosed, and made to feel sick for 8 years resulting in very poor appetite, increased anxiety and intrusive thoughts, and stunted physical and social growth.
      • austinheap 7y ago
        Doctors will also tell you this: if you feel ADHD drugs then you’re not ADHD.
      • vonseel 7y ago
        I’m on Adderall for ~12 years but I disagree. Although I agree with the previous commenter, I don’t think it extends my “normal” productive max. Sure, occasionally I can feel productive for an extended stretch, but usually I feel wiped out after 4-6 hours of any real effort. I just had an hour long phone call and that alone was tiring..
  • Proziam 7y ago
    I can only speak for myself, but I don't even consume much caffeine anymore and still maintain 80+ hours. Between managing people, building products, meeting with clients, documentation, and more I always have something I can do that doesn't require my maximum performance at the moment. In fact, I'd go as far as to say my personal lifestyle and habits (eating healthy, maintaining daily exercise, blah blah) are massive contributors to my having sustained this consistent output since 2012.
  • originalbryan2 7y ago
    In my 20s I worked 80-90 hours for ... 4-6 months. It was day job, then side hustle software that I was very excited about. Now in my late 30s with kids, yeesh. Honestly it's impossible to get 40 hours in some weeks. Edit: no drug use
    • x2f10 7y ago
      Is it impossible even with effort or you no longer feel the effort is required and/or necessary?
      • originalbryan2 7y ago
        Some months, with effort, domestic responsibility and my personal health make it impossible. But my whole family has been sick a lot this fall. Edit: I still feel tremendous pressure to work more/longer.
• CydeWeys 7y ago
  Totally agree with this. To give an example, in the months ahead of launching .app (which I was the tech lead of), I was pulling some 50-60 hour work-weeks vs a typical 40. That was exhausting and definitely the maximum I was capable of pulling (talking about actual hours of work here, not just hours spent in the office). Plus, post-launch, I took things easy for a couple months to recover.
  • embit 7y ago
    Agreed. I can do more than 40 hours of intense focused work not more than once a quarter.
• carbocation 7y ago
  I did a few years of 80 hours, but that was as a medical resident / fellow. There is a lot of creativity in medicine (especially thinking adversarially to try to reduce premature closure on a diagnosis), but even then certainly we’re not being creative for all 80 hours a week.
  • randycupertino 7y ago
    Agree with this. Also in medicine we can work 12hr or 24hr shifts which imo helps "stack" together more hours so it's easier to hit larger work weeks. As an EMT some of our crew worked 1 48hr shift and then later in the week 1 24hr shift. They got paid so little ($9.25 an hour back then!) that was the only way to survive in the Bay Area was to stack your shifts and then hit time and a half after 40hrs and double time for the last 20 hrs. I had a preceptor who worked those shifts and I had to work her schedule while she was evaluating me. It was horrific. The 48s were brutal and I was wrecked later in the week when it came time to do the 24. Those months went by in a blur and it was basically hell to get through it. When I advanced and got to set my own schedule I just worked 1 24hr and 1 12hr and life was great. Got to do chores and errands and long hiking trips on my days off, had enough time to travel and enjoy my hobbies. Left EMS to more of an office job because I needed to make more $$, but I miss the patients, the camaraderie, and being out in the field.
• Aunche 7y ago
  A lot of surgeons have 80 hour workweeks. This is especially common is smaller hospitals in rural areas. It's not all surgery, but they're definitely not sitting at their desks and doing nothing. Before regulations, it was not uncommon for some doctors to work over 100 hours because they were in such high demand.
  • lr4444lr 7y ago
    For how much of that time are they actually performing the specialized work or at least decision making that only they can do?
    • susijdjdjxa 7y ago
      This sounds like moving the goalposts for the definition of work.
  • droopyEyelids 7y ago
    This doesn't exactly address the point. Human beings are only capable of sustained attention for limited periods of time, plus they have biological needs and must navigate a physical world. Now, if you're just talking about time on the clock, then sure- 168 hours is the limit per week. But we're talking about people doing productive, mentally demanding work. 80 hours might not be possible.
    • pc86 7y ago
      Medical residents routinely do close to 80 hours, and I would argue on average a small single digit number of those hours are unproductive. My SO is an OB resident and worked over 90 hours last week, and probably 75 of that was either in surgery, reading, studying, or giving a presentation of one form or another. About half of her weeks are above the 80 hour limit. It's definitely possible. Just because we don't want to do it (I don't either!) or that it has negative long-term consequences doesn't mean it's not possible.
      • lonelappde 7y ago
• nugget 7y ago
  Sometimes the hard part of the job isn't the number of hours per week at a desk but the need to always be on call to deal with problems. For me, being on call leads my brain into thinking about potential problems ahead of time, so there's a low level of work-related background noise going on all the time anyway.
• toufka 7y ago
  It does happen, but generally in environments that are different from the 'normal' workplace - environments that contain a sense of community, where breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and sometimes evenings and sleeping are part of the job: grad school, hospitals, fieldwork, law/consulting/IB firms, etc. It seems like the mid-decade tech ideal was to import that kind of workplace style. And you're right, that those hours are not all 'at the desk working', but they are still most definitely working hours when you're waiting for a page, an email, or a piece of data that require immediate response at 3am. That kind of work can be deeply rewarding (in retrospect), but is very clearly damaging if it persists for too long.
  • zentiggr 7y ago
    I can say I've done a few 72 - 96 hour stretches of near total wakefulness (power naps of 20-40 minutes as possible, food and caffeine available nearly any time) but there's definitely a feeling of disconnect, being separate from the senses and just floating inside my own head toward the end of those. We're talking full up tactical exercises in the military, and a couple of critical repair scenarios here and there since. A couple of days of near total downtime is a minimum to reset from that kind of effort, and 'normal' work for at least a week or two if possible.
• AndrewKemendo 7y ago
  Most of my work weeks clock in around 50-60 hours regularly. It's pretty simple how this happens. It's meetings all day and then once meetings are over it's email, documents, admin paperwork, training etc... Here's an example of just last Thursday which was busy but was at least not double booked and had some times I could stop and go to the bathroom, I also wasn't traveling this day which was good: 8-12 - US Senate Staff Delegation and budget review 12-1 - Software Requisition Review 1-2 - Infrastructure planning meeting 2-3 - Conference call with colleague in HI 3-4 - Meeting with an LP 4-5 - Talking with my Deputy and Admin 5-7 - Meeting with Army Futures 7 - Dinner 8-10 - Emails, Award review for employees, look over presentations due in Jan/Feb Now, almost none of that work is creative because I'm not in a creative job anymore really. I am an executive with a 200 person data engineering and data science team building the future way the DoD builds and runs software. That's how you get to these hours. I'd also suggest that "Building and nurturing relationships" isn't "Bullshit work."
  • bwb 7y ago
    Yep sorry, I misspoke, I meant more non-creative but vital work. I just spent a day doing nothing by CRM work and data entry and used a colorful pejorative :) I think that is how you get to 60 hours, I don't think that is how you get to 80 hours like I said.
  • whatshisface 7y ago
    You can also get hours like that by working multiple low-level service or industrial jobs, or working a lot of overtime at a job that pays overtime. I have known people to do both, and the only thing that really limits it is the cost to your personal life and basic maintenance (relationships, health, home repair, that kind of stuff.) Men with a stay at home wife who is good at managing the home and keeping up relationships can really push it for long periods of time and come out fine in the end, but it's becoming increasingly rare for families to be able to get by with only one person working.
    • jotm 7y ago
      I've seen too many people happy about overtime... I dunno, I worked 12 hour days for weeks and it was hell. Doing something on the side, anything that makes some extra cash, seems better than straight up overtime.
• blhack 7y ago
  Ive done it. It was a startup, but not explicitly a tech company. We legitimately got to work at 7:30 every day and left at 9:00 7 days a week for several weeks. Obviously unsustainable, but easily one of the most enjoyable periods of my work life. Everybody was helping doing everybody else’s job. It was really fun.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
• bobthemover 7y ago
  The fact is that the nature of work changes at the c level. You are no longer doing any actual work yourself. You don’t prepare specifications, do analysis or any other for of work that you might recognize from before. You won’t touch any Microsoft products yourself. Your team does this. You are responsible for hiring people to build that team for you, so even people management is delegated to a large extent. Most of your work is being present, either in meetings or work functions. These will include breakfast lunch and dinner, and something all three on the same day. Your main focus is communication. This work extends to working within your own departments, the company, the rest of senior management, government, share holders, banks etc. Most of your hours are not effective. You write them off. It’s understanding that you only have 10 hours a week of effective hours out of 80 hours and making sure those hours are actually effective.Effective time will be 5 minutes in an hour most likely. That said some people are really good at juggling all of this bs, and some people are really terrible. We can talk about different approaches and what works and what doesn’t, but it doesn’t change the fact that the 80 to 100 hour work week is real for a lot of people in that position.
• lefstathiou 7y ago
  I’m confused. You say you don’t believe anyone does 80 hours and then you seem to add a qualifier to define work as that which is creative or meaningful. To your first statement, it is possible and very common in law and investment banking, so it’s easy to dispel that misconception for you. I worked in investment banking for years and there were dozens of people on my floor which was one of dozens of floors pulling 70-90 hour weeks routinely. There is some % of an 80 hour week lost in transition (sitting at a desk waiting for feedback on a book that needs to go to printing by 4am for the 8am meeting) but you have no choice but to be there and at any moment you have to be prepared to act on whatever next step is required. To your second point: was this work deeply creative or meaningful? To me it was. Perhaps less creative than technical. As for meaning, that depends. We would routinely work on projects that had 9-figure dollar impact on companies with tens of thousands of employees. Our numbers determined the fates of thousands of employees and hundreds of thousands in their supply chains. Today I manage over 50 people, while I have a more direct human impact now than I did then, my impact today is a fraction of what it was when our teams changed the course of companies from a little Excel spreadsheet.
• soperj 7y ago
  I worked pipeline. We'd do 11 hour days, 3 weeks on, 3 days off. Not quite 80 hours, but we worked the entire time.
• awinder 7y ago
  I have strong feelings on this and am almost afraid to post because of, I suppose, the stigma of being a hard worker. But this is what I’ve seen & experienced: 1. Hours worked & productivity are interrelated variables but they do not equal each other. So you have to explore the other variables involved in your productivity equation if you want to control effects on productivity. 2. The brain works on solving big problems even when you’re not actively focused on it. Anyone who experiences the effect of coming back to a problem they were beating their heads on for a while and quickly figured out a path forward has experienced this first hand. 3. If you’ve bought into this, then also consider that your output is solved problems. That’s what other people will see about your work. If the outcome is that you stayed at the office for 12 hours solving a problem, versus at work for 6 hours, said f this, went home, came back the next morning and worked the problem out in an hour, then what was the difference? You kinda keyed in that a lot of work is not creative, so I think that kinda fits into this framework too. I find that doing rote work is a nice warm up or wind down block of time. So having scheduling awareness can help boost your productivity. But yeah for all of that, I’ve never been able to buy into the idea that 60/80 hour work weeks are at all a necessary idea, or a very proper one either. And this is how I’ve tried to make myself feel better that I could never personally do that kind of time, lol.
• nik736 7y ago
  I can tell you that I worked 80 hours a week for several months and while it is not effective, it was "necessary" for the business to survive. I had 4-6 hours per day that were really effective (if even), the others were just there to get simple stuff done, which was necessary to meet deadlines. Would I do it again? Absolutely not, because it is simply bad management. But I can imagine how easy it is to get stuck in such a work environment. Or people might think "when it is working once, it will work all the time". The truth is that if the deadlines and work would have been planned better it would easily be achievable in 40 hours. The problem is that some startups are super chaotic, overpromise, underdeliver without even thinking about how long something takes.
• Permit 7y ago
  I think it's possible but probably not sustainable. Nick Winters did a 120-hour programming/game-dev workweek and filmed it so you could see if he was cheating: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0qlr22cF14 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0qlr22cF14 HN discussion at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6760685 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6760685 I'm also open to the possibility that might be a very small percentage of people who could do it and that I might just not be one of them. I'm also open to the possibility that I've been conditioned to expect 40 hour work weeks and that's why I may not be able to do much more. Apparently it's common for students in China to attend school for 12 hours a day. Perhaps if I'd been raised in a similar environment it would be easier to focus for longer?
• losvedir 7y ago
  > I don't believe anyone really does 80 hours. I just don't think it is possible That's a weird thing to believe. I saw it all the time when I worked in finance (but I was capped at 60 hrs, which I did routinely), and it seems pretty par-for-the-course for my friends who are doctors and lawyers. I don't think it's healthy, but it's certainly done.
• efsavage 7y ago
  If you find something you love doing and can do it in the way you want, 80 hours isn't bad at all if you're otherwise unencumbered. I did a 7 month stretch where I was working from home, on my own schedule, doing what I loved, and was doing 15-18 hour days 6 days a week (~90-100/week), while still managing to have/cook dinner and a bit of downtime with my now-wife each day, plus a full day off. It was fantastic. Once the product was live the work shifted just so slightly from pure create/build to maintenance/improvements, going into the office a couple of days a week, and suddenly even 60 hours felt like a lot, and eventually it was just a job and I was doing 40-45. I think it's more a matter of finding the right thing and schedule for you rather than imposing some kind of convention onto it.
• davedx 7y ago
  I don't believe anyone really does 60 hours. I just don't think it is possible and I don't think you can call sitting at a desk doing nothing "work".
• SecurityAmoeba 7y ago
  I work in IT Security. I do 2-4 pentests a week. I shouldn’t, but I work for a small firm and don’t have much control. I easily do 80 hours a week. If I don’t we don’t get enough done, we bleed clients, and I worry about clients getting hacked. I should not work 80 hour weeks, I do not think it should be possible, but I definitely work 80 hour weeks and I am not wasting time. I do web app pentests, network and infrastructure pentests, and emergency response when they need help, and that is easily an 80 hour week. Maybe 5-10 hours of that is meetings. The rest is legitimate work.
• Kenji 7y ago
  I think you're completely clueless as to how long it is possible to work per week. Granted, it will destroy you to work 80 hours per week for prolonged periods of time. But it's entirely possible.
• smallgovt 7y ago
  It’s definitely possible to work 80 hrs of real work per week. I’ve done it myself. Your mistake is probably underestimating how diverse people’s values are. If you have a strong enough reason why, working non stop is fulfilling (especially when it becomes habit).
  • notacoward 7y ago
    > underestimating how diverse people’s values are While we're valuing diversity, let's consider diversity of circumstance as well as attitudes. Working 80 hours a week is not the same for someone who's single and healthy vs. someone who is themselves disabled or who has family members who require significant care. Assuming or implying that it's only about values is exactly what makes this discussion so contentious. Many people have the "right" values but their work role or their non-work situation is not as conducive to long hours. Or maybe they've just read the actual research instead of relying on anecdata - especially cherry-picked (or outright fabricated) stories from CEOs and VCs who benefit more from others' overwork than those people do themselves. For most people, 80 hours per week is just not healthy or sustainable.
• king_panic 7y ago
  My experience is ~4 of productive creative work per day. I can go to 6-8, but that gets drawn out to a 12-14h workday. 4h is where Im happiest and most productive. I dont force it.
• trianglem 7y ago
  I’ve literally worked for 85-95 hours over the last 15 days with no days off except Christmas Day at 12-14 hours per day.