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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 ema

• 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.
    • manigandham 7y ago
      Overtime is a far better deal. You don't have to commute or switch environments, just continue doing what you're doing (which may not be all that bad) and make a multiplier based on far you go overtime. Add in holidays and other shifts and some people can double their income doing overtime which would be impossible to pull off with a second job.
    • acdha 7y ago
      You cut out all of the overhead: no new processes, policies, and personalities to learn; the work environment is already setup, as is billing; and there’s no chance of conflict of interest concerns. There’s also no expectation of it continuing, which is good if you don’t want to have to deal with a side project running longer than expected. That’s bad if you’re looking for a true second job but I’ve known plenty of, say, young non-Christians who happily worked on Christmas at a healthy bonus.
    • whatshisface 7y ago
      You usually make more per hour working overtime than you would working at a second job. 1.5x is a typical multiplier, which is not a small raise! It's also worth pointing out that not every hourly job is equally mind-numbing.
  • AmericanChopper 7y ago
    I worked in restaurants and bars when I was younger, and pulled in 80-100 hours every week for a few years. When I got my first engineering job I did the same thing, trying (successfully) to learn and develop my career as quickly as I could. I’ve also gone through phases of working 60+ hours as a contractor, trying to save as much money as possible. For me at least, doing that much productive work in a week was never very difficult, but it was only possible because I had no real responsibilities at home. I had friends, but barely spent any time with them, and I once went 5 years without taking a holiday. I wouldn’t do that again today, but for a young person trying to set themselves up in life, it makes perfect sense.
• parthdesai 7y ago
  I'm asking this seriously, but how much of that was actual work done? I would be pretty surprised if you said that you actually worked for entire 4 hours between 8-12.
  • natalyarostova 7y ago
    It’s just not comparable to IC work. In each of those meetings as an exec he probably makes 1 important decision. If he didn’t make that decision correctly it could cost his org weeks or millions of dollars. That is work, but exec work is just different.
    • parthdesai 7y ago
      Right, I completely agree, but him saying that he worked for entitreity of those 4 hours is a bit misleading imo. We all know how "efficient" these meetings are.
      • ClumsyPilot 7y ago
        I don't think it's fair to suggest he was slacking or something, unless you can show that the norm is to accomplish same job far faster. Perhaps it would be fair to say, it is easier/more natural to spend 12 hours in a day dealing with people that moving bags of coal or solving differential equations.
        • wolco 7y ago
          Those hour meetings act as a crutch that drain or energize us and falsely trick us into thinking we've done something productive. Those 12 hours could have been spent differently to acheive the same or better results if optimized time management matters but I don't believe they do matter in this case. This person is fueled by the meeting (he leaves the meeting stronger) and by shortening his day he would never fully be in a zone.
          • AndrewKemendo 7y ago
• tmpz22 7y ago
  Do you ever feel stressed, anxious, or trapped, with such a packed schedule? And do you ever feel regret over the value you produce due to the fact that you're stretched in so many directions? My career - I think - is heading in the same direction (though still early) and I have a severe problem internalizing every little thing and its relative yield to the business. Thankfully I only manage 3 people at a small company, but training alone has been my biggest regret because I know there is so much potential in the team that has been untapped because we haven't invested enough into training (mostly due to my ability to generate and executing training resources and exercises).
  • AndrewKemendo 7y ago
    Nope, I'm at my best in days like this. I feel immensely grateful I was given the opportunity and responsibility to lead and want other people to understand how great (in many senses of the term) that responsibility is. The days where we deep dive infrastructure problems or try and get at organizational technical problems are my favorite, but those are even longer days.
    • icelend 7y ago
      This is all cool, and I'm happy for you for your privilege and luck. However, I'm not sure what your anecdote has to do with what Shopify's CEO is saying. Certainly your hours are not necessary, rather you (and/or your manager) just choose to do them? Or do you think your employer would be significantly damaged if you did not?
• mindblownlazy 7y ago
  I keep seeing this but why do non-creatives count dinner, commuting and exercise as work? (You don't do all these but you put dinner there) As a creative I find it hard to justify that, sure I did talk about work during lunch with a coworker or an ex coworker or friend but damn I was just enjoying my pork chops, that's not work!!!
  • AndrewKemendo 7y ago
    I don't count dinner as work, that was just my whole schedule.
    • mlthoughts2018 7y ago
      Do you feel as a society that we should condone working beyond dinner like like? As I read your schedule, I think, “if this couldn’t be handled between 9-5, with a no-work break for lunch, then something is wrong here and effective decisions aren’t being made.” I say this as someone with a similar job, the machine learning manager with several teams reporting to me, budgets in the tens of millions per year, staffing decisions, executive meetings, procurement, etc. in a large global ecommerce company, with a similar large scale mission about data driven decision making. If myself or any of the managers or teams reporting in to me has to work past dinner or _ever_ has to work (even just looking at Slack) on weekends, that’s a massive, critical failure on my part. Unless we make it a critical company mission level priority, this type of healthy work/life balance culture won’t happen. It has to come down from leaders through example first, especially simply stopping work after about 8 hours that fit in with the diversity of personal life needs reflected by the overall staff (not just preferences of people who don’t mind working late or have fewer obligations preventing it). I actually think one of the most critical signs of an effective leader is _not_ working, electing to let certain work take longer than it otherwise could — and defending that decision to executives — as part of maturity in establishing a healthy culture. Working more hours is like taking the lazy way out in some regards. It’s much harder work to build healthy patterns over time. It’s kind of similar to developing the senior engineering skill / discipline to avoid unnecessary refactoring and avoid cluttering up a set of changes with superfluous extra fixes. It takes more discipline to hold back and do it the right way.
• mattrp 7y ago
  This is a typical executive schedule. If you’re managing a global workforce, you can generally take 2am to 6am quiet hours but that’s about it. It’s not everyday but at minimum you’d usually see check-ins from Europe needing response coming in around midnight to 2am pretty much every day.
  • AndrewKemendo 7y ago
    Yup, we've got people worldwide.
• m0zg 7y ago
  Yeah, that kind of low intensity work I could do for longer (although I'd rather not). Try to maintain the level of concentration required for non-trivial programming for more than a few hours a day though - it doesn't really work. It's the difference between a leisurely bike ride (which you could do all day) and running five miles.
• randomsearch 7y ago
  No offence, but I’ve done extremely creative and demanding intellectual work, and then work like you’ve listed. What you’re doing is valuable and useful work, but it is a lot easier to do. Much less mentally demanding.
  • AndrewKemendo 7y ago
    This is generally the wrong attitude in my opinion. I've done both very technical/creative demanding work and the organizational work as I describe. What you realize after a while is that they are both hard, but in different ways because it's different work.
    • notacoward 7y ago
      The question IMO is not whether it's easier or harder, but whether it's more or less sustainable. That in itself is two questions: (1) Is it sustainable in the sense that you can remain productive throughout one day? (2) Is is sustainable in the sense that you can keep doing it day after day? I would say the answer to (1) is generally yes. Meetings usually require continuous partial attention rather than intense focus, involve multiple people, and often have built-in breaks. All of those help to prevent the problem of an exhausted lone programmer getting stuck in the weeds for hours before they realize - usually as soon as they take a break - that they've been looking in entirely the wrong direction. The answer to (2) depends more on the person. For a true introvert, meetings all day will be incredibly draining, and even a conference lasting a few days can be intolerable without careful energy management. For an extrovert, such a schedule can be energizing and almost infinitely sustainable. The key here is that for certain combinations of people and tasks a schedule like that is sustainable. However, that doesn't mean it's reasonable to expect programmers can do their job at that pace sustainably. Productivity will drop and/or they'll burn out. What irks me about these conversations is that people with personalities or situations that are amenable to one kind of work schedule are looking down their noses at people with completely different personalities or situations that make it a poor fit. I don't mean that as a criticism of you specifically, but others taking the same position or making the same points have displayed an appalling lack of empathy.