6 ms·

Work/Life Balance at a Startup -- Just a Pipedream?

58 points by jeanhsu 16y ago

phil_y 16y ago
I'm involved in a startup since 9 months ago. After the first 3 months wich were loaded with tons of work, long hours and a lot of stress someone told me to categorize the work on my todo-list, to think about wich tasks i could delegate to others and to filter the most important ones (a common model for this wich helped me a lot can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_management#The_Eisenhower_Method http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_management#The_Eisenhower_...). Now I still have a lot to do, but i can manage to take a day off from time to time, i even went skiing for 4 days without working there. In my opinion people lose their attitude and motivation if they dont take time to do something besides working and think about other things.
patio11 16y ago
I spoke to someone a few months ago, and what I remember most vividly about the conversation was when he said, "once your team starts going home for dinner, you know you're in trouble." This is an example of a social pathology on two levels. First, it means that working for that one particular company sucks. Second, it is being deployed to make working sucks normative at other companies, too. (And if it gets widely repeated by credulous entrepreneurs, it will infect their lives, their employees lives, etc etc. The viral factor of suck in the social graph has exceeded k = 1.0, watch out!) It has not been my experience that the narrative this social pathology tells about work being necessarily all-consuming has basis in objective reality. I've done all-consuming work. My business' schedule doesn't resemble that schedule even a little itty-bitty bit.
- robryan 16y ago
  Your ideas are designed around being able to do business like this, rightly or wrongly others go into over ambitious ideas undermanned and the long hours are probably the only way they are going to pull it off.
  - patio11 16y ago
    This assumes that working more hours actually makes you produce more value, which is highly non-obvious to me. I didn't produce twice as much stuff when I was working twice as many hours. I'm not even sure net output decreased since radically cutting hours. Mythical man month, etc.
    - Tyrannosaurs 16y ago
      Obviously it depends on the nature of the work but I believe the research actually supports this position. Certainly my experience of coding is that you can do extra hours for a short while and get some benefit but more than a couple of weeks and that starts falling away pretty rapidly. Even in the short term though it's limited. Beyond midnight (assuming that I've started at 9am-ish and worked relatively solidly) I'm pretty much breaking as much as I'm fixing, plus I tend to be setting myself up for a pretty significant productivity hit the day after.
      - yummyfajitas 16y ago
        The trick is to do difficult work early, and save the easy/boring grunt work for the 8-midnight period.
        Tyrannosaurs 16y ago
        Interesting. Personally I find the more boring the work the more likely I am to mess it up when tired. At least something tricky gives you some mental stimulation which helps you push through the tiredness and stay focused (or as focused as you can be). Sure there are those days when you're knackered so you just tidy your inbox, sort out your expenses and so on but most people really don't have that much work of that nature to do.
  - jjm 16y ago
    Here here. If your guys can't get it done in a normal timeframe they never will. Especially so if your guys are already working 70 hrs/week. Adding another 20 won't help you. Go back to the drawing board, plan better, go MVP for each iteration etc...
- revorad 16y ago
  Patrick, I think you are well aware that much of the difference between your views on this issue and those of the majority of the startup community stems from a fundamental disagreement on the definition of a startup. As you pointed out yesterday (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2382580 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2382580), we waste too much time on naming things. So, why don't we simply agree that you are in a different business than the OP's company? You are a one-man operation who scales by outsourcing; they are a team who scale by hiring through investment ($1M). You want careful, measured growth; they want superfast growth, whatever the cost. You are an efficient time manager, who's built "passive" income and chooses to spend a lot of time on HN just for fun; they work crazy hours in the hope of making it really big some day, even if the personal cost today is high. I'm sure a typical overworked startup could benefit from adopting some of your ways, but it is equally hard for them to see your point as it is for you to see theirs. You haven't been on the other side.
  - profquail 16y ago
    they work crazy hours in the hope of making it really big some day, even if the personal cost today is high. When you say, "they", you're talking about entrepreneurs who have made a personal choice to make that sacrifice; or, a team of entrepreneurs who have agreed, amongst themselves, to all make that sacrifice together. I read Patrick's argument as railing against the kind of "entrepreneurs" who are really just free-loading, glorified managers that get angry when anyone on the team starts "slacking" (i.e., working less than 80-100 hours / week) because they're relying on the hard work of other people to bring them their fortune instead of actually doing anything themselves.
    - revorad 16y ago
      I don't think founders are conning employees to exploit them. Employees should be well aware of what they are getting into. There are plenty of well-paying normal jobs available out there.
  - zasz 16y ago
    Patrick is talking about his life as a Japanese salaryman, where 12 (14?) hour workdays are the daily norm at his company, and, if I recall correctly, there are no weekends. He is not talking about Bingo Card Creator.
jdee 16y ago
It's not a pipedream. We run a dev team that is both productive and enthused about the work we do. Every single engineer is out the door by 6, unless there is something that needs completing urgently. We are constantly shipping new versions of our product, are very profitable and have a minute churn rate of developers. My gut feeling is that developers who cultivate a lifestyle that will inevitably lead to them burning out are either drinking the koolaid of some kind of cliched' notion of how developers should perform, or are simply being exploited by their employers. Everyone has a right to see their family and keep fit, and in this sellers market, developers CAN work at a sustainable pace that doesnt put their future careers at stake.
- arethuza 16y ago
  Isn't it arguably a component to "startup" culture that maximizes apparent effort (which is easy to measure) rather than actual productivity - which is very difficult to measure objectively. Note: I have founded startups (a long time ago now) that very much went with the traditional startup culture but have also worked at small new companies that didn't have this culture at all but still did pretty well.
whyleym 16y ago
I founded a startup with my brother 5 years ago - we launched in my two weeks paternity leave from work. For the first 4 years we both held down full time jobs and worked on our startup every evening. I had my 2nd child when the startup turned 4 any my brother had his first around the same time. I'm not sure if it's because we are family, but we've always had a policy (not written down or set in stone) but that if one of us wants some time off then we do. We pretty much do normal hours (10 - 6), we still work a few evenings, but we're now both full time so haven't got the added stress of a 'day job'. It was always our dream to be able to work full time on our startup and now that's a reality there is honestly no other job i'd rather be doing. We both get to see our kids everyday, i'm due to be taking my eldest (4) swimming at lunch. Based on my experience (every startup is different), we do live and breath it, but at the same time we always make time for family, holidays and anything else we want to do (taking the kids for days out, nursery, the gym). Our startup is actually doing better than ever and I personally feel that because we put in all the work in the first few years whilst holding down a full time job we are now in a position to be able to enjoy the fruits of our labour and have a great work/life balance.
maxer 16y ago
I disagree with a few comments here- if i go home I am just going to play xbox, would it not be spent better writing code? Plus I enjoy what I do in the office, it can be stressful but its not like 12-16 hours hard physical labour. I dont work weekends though other than answer email or support requests
- jjm 16y ago
  You can (and probably will) burn out at that rate. I've heard this argument many times, and of those times 50% of burn outs left the industry.
- brown9-2 16y ago
  if i go home I am just going to play xbox, would it not be spent better writing code? You need to quantify what "better" means here to even begin to answer this question: - better for your mental health to take a break or have some fun? - better for your code quality to not introduce mistakes due to tiredness? - better from some economic standpoint because you petceive the increased value in what you produce to be greater than what you value xbox-time at?
- grammaton 16y ago
  Perhaps you're a workaholic. If so, I wouldn't be surprised that the idea of just unwinding for a while seems strange and alien. If you don't want to do it more power to you, but to those that do - they tend to think of it as an investment in their health.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
ibagrak 16y ago
What I found is that passion is one of those things that always seems excessive in retrospect and insufficient going forward. When I reflect on my periods of professional exuberance, I am always struck by how much I missed out being with my family and friends. Likewise, in the times of lull I am always guilt tripping myself about not being passionate enough, or not giving it my all. Ultimately, the right balance depends on your own perspective on life, which in term depends on your age, personality, family situation, etc. But the older I get the more convinced I become that you can't go wrong if you err on the side of life.
jasonkester 16y ago
Work/Life Balance is fundamentally a personal thing. If you make it a priority, you can take it with you anywhere you go. When I talk to a potential employer, I make a point of telling them that I work 40 hour weeks and I take a lot of time off. I've gone so far as to negotiate away my stock options in favor of extra paid holiday and the ability to take unpaid leave. Even when working for startups that think they're in crunch mode (and have been for the last 6 months), I make Life a priority. Where I can, I try to spread the faith. Surprisingly, I've never experienced a case where I couldn't fix things and had to leave. Stress is infectious. But so is Sanity. I've walked into shops where 60 hour weeks were the norm and managed to infect the team with the concept of Work/Life balance. First, you introduce the idea of "the weekend", where I'm living the back of my truck next to a crag someplace (and so should you), so don't try to contact me. Then you bring in "leave at six", then eventually "40 hour weeks". All the while keeping the rest of the team on board with the idea that maybe we should have lives apart from work. Eventually, you have a whole team working 40 hour weeks and not looking so unhealthy. Some of whom even have stories to tell when you ask what they did for the weekend. Better still, if everybody is slacking off at a sane pace, there's really nothing that management can do about it (except notice how much more work is getting done).
- pm 16y ago
  Congratulations, this is how it should be. I run a business and have managed to hire people who come in late, leave at the regular time and still get more than enough done. I mostly work weekends, but I'm a masochist. I don't wish it on my employees. They need to have a life.
- jeanhsu 16y ago
  Glad to hear this perspective, as a lot of early comments were on the other end of the spectrum. Still finding my way in startup world, but it's encouraging to hear others who have been there and managed to make it work!
madaxe 16y ago
Balance is a pipedream. Success is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration - glib, but true. We started 5 years ago - I've been on call 24/7 ever since. We've now got other people on call too, sure, but as the technical lead, I'm where the buck stops. An average week is in the region of 70-80 hours work. I have precious little in the way of "life" - I allow myself a few hours off once a week on Thursdays, but apart from that, spend my time glued to my laptop, growing the business. That said, I see several ways out. 1) This sucker actually works, and we retire. 2) This sucker actually works, and we grow it into a behemoth. 3) Ditto and we sell, and I re-invest the proceeds into my next mad idea. 1 is pretty unlikely. 2&3 are far more likely, which rather reflects the fact that my work is my life, and if you're doing a startup without that attitude, it's going to suffer. A startup is effectively all about selling a "regular" 20/30's for a decade (or two) of brutally hard work, high stress, and attaining financial and inventive freedom. Sorry, I'm rambling. No coffee yet this morning.
- dschobel 16y ago
  1 is pretty unlikely. 2&3 are far more likely It's funny you say "more likely" when the odds are still, to be blunt, stacked against you (I'm not trying to be a jerk, but you probably realize it's all still a longshot). Ultimately I think your value function has to heavily and positively weight the work you're doing for 12 hours a day. If you're missing your free time I don't see how any rational person can voluntarily continue working those hours.
  - madaxe 16y ago
    Ah, but I don't miss the free time, partially because I've rationally weighed up short-term costs against long-term benefits, and partially because I've come to realise that I actually enjoy working myself to the bone - hence the probability that even after this, I'll likely put myself straight back into the grinder with something new. As to 2&3 - we've already had a few substantial (8 figure, cash) offers for the business, but we've passed them up, as they were the wrong buyers at the wrong time.
    - correij 16y ago
nsoonhui 16y ago
I have been involving in a startup since one year ago. Result: I broke one relationship, and missed another. When my mom came visiting me from another state I didn't have the time to bring her around, and not even the time to talk to her. When everyone is enjoying the weekends I have to lock myself in my room and code, code CODE. When everyone is enjoying TVs after coming back from work, I read emails, filter resumes and do other work related stuffs. I don't have personal life; all of my time is consumed by this one little startup which may or may not work in the future. Now you know why relationship won't work for me at this stage of time? So whenever someone told me that they could have a nice work/life balance at a startup, I smiled. And when girls told me that they would support their husbands in pursuing their dreams at all cost, I could only conclude that they didn't know what they wish for. They haven't seen the true cost of startup, yet.
- WA 16y ago
  There is a difference between "I didn't have time" and "I didn't want to spend time". It is entirely up to you and you decided to not have time for them, but for your startup. Or put another way: You decided for the part in you that wants to work on the startup instead of the part in you that wants to deal with your mother or your girlfriend. When I read something like this, I sometimes wonder what the intention of people of running a startup is. Is it really about creating an app? The app/startup will be forgotten at some point in time anyways. So why are you doing it, if it isn't for the personal freedom that comes along with a startup (eventually) and that enables you to spend more time with the people you care about? I mean, it is just a startup. The people might care to some degree about your product, but they don't care about you at all and you shouldn't care too much either. I know that the "work hard" mantra is ridiculously widespread in the startup culture and especially in the US and I also know the feeling that one's mind always comes up with new ideas, whether you want it or not. However, I prefer to work on my startup 5 to 10 hours a week, just enough to get decent money from it, be ahead of competitors and make plans or delegate the work that needs to be done. I think the real trick in startups is not to spend as much time as possible, but as few time as possible and still get good results. At least, that is how it works for me and how it supports the general idea, why I run a startup at all: to increase my personal freedom.
wheels 16y ago
I think the question is entirely different for founders and employees. For founders, the question loses some of its meaning, because the company itself is intrinsically tied to personal goals. Founders tend to not refer to the company as "a job". It's something of a different beast. This doesn't mean that some time doing non-company stuff won't ever be required to maintain sanity, but the dynamics are pretty different. For employees, which this post seems to be about, you're ultimately working to fulfill someone else's personal goals. There it makes a lot more sense to balance working on your own personal goals and pastimes or whatever with working on the goals of the person who's signing your paychecks. The problem is that if there's a sufficient supply of employees who are willing to forgo that for whatever reason (loving the work, not having much of a life, peer pressure) then they're more likely to be favored by the employers with the implications that go along with that.
- jeanhsu 16y ago
  Yes, I'd imagine it'd be quite different for employees and founders. I don't know if I'm willing to make that kind of sacrifice though--maybe that means I'm not cut out to be a founder. Or maybe I haven't found the right opportunity yet.
zyfo 16y ago
I don't get this. On the one hand there's the 40h-a-week camp, backed up by plenty of research [1] and on the other hand there's the work-as-much-as-you-possibly-can camp, which seems to be what plenty of successful startup have been following. So what's the deal? Why this discrepancy? It's not about manual vs knowledge working - studies on knowledge workers show that even less than 40h / week is beneficial. Is it about the difference in possible leverage? Self-directed work? The close link between work and payoff? The stressful situation in a startup? The 100% commitment? Any attempts to pin down why and under what circumstances [2] different work hour guidelines should apply would be greatly appreciated. 1: See studies in this pdf http://www.lostgarden.com/2008/09/rules-of-productivity-presentation.html http://www.lostgarden.com/2008/09/rules-of-productivity-pres... 2: What's the difference between starting your own company, running your own company, joining a startup, doing a PhD, being in a research team, working at an established startup?
- JanezStupar 16y ago
  It could be that successful startups succeed in spite of overtime not because of it. Also a lot of successful startups are done by (young) people who haven't had their asses handed to them because of their insane work ethics. There indeed are stretches when one gets carried by passion and can work (almost) 24/7. One should use that wave. But when you find yourself disliking what you're doing you better stop and not write posts as in the OP. OP is just making up excuses for feeling of guilt one feels divided between family and promise they made to themselves/somebody else. To me it seems like excuses fat people have about losing weight - or drunks about stopping drinking (when catch yourself saying - shit x is wrong and I dislike shit y in my life, but I'm still doing great - some red lights should start spinning). To OP if you're reading this - look into mirror take a deep breath and admit that you're a workaholic. There are some "mommy" and "daddy" issues in your soul you need to resolve. You're using your work to punish yourself for something you're not even guilty of.
brown9-2 16y ago
Until someone can prove that more hours = more value, I refuse to believe this "startup mentality" is anything but a cargo cult mentality. Weird for a culture that so prizes data and science to endlessly repeat certain mantras as truth without any validation.
- grammaton 16y ago
  I think a lot of it comes from people reading certain luminaries - our own beloved Paul Graham comes to mind - who have good points, but not exercising critical judgement about whether said points apply to one's own situation.
wslh 16y ago
I believe that beyond work/life balance there is a difference between hard work and madness. Many startups (and companies) need to go to a psychiatric hospital, they are very unorganized and the team leaders doesn't take full responsability and respect for people times. Another thing is being really focused and concentrated on moving forward in your 40 hours week (not checking HN too much...) and doing extra hours when it's really necessary.
webjunkie 16y ago
If your team cannot wait to leave at 6 you have a problem, but if you send your team home at 6 because they worked efficiently and achieved something, that's some work life balance then.
jonnycat 16y ago
I don't dare to make any sweeping generalizations about this, but I would love to see how age, location and amount of time spent working at startups correlates with some of the opinions here. I suspect there might be some interesting (if not entirely unsurprising) trends there.
naner 16y ago
Perhaps I'm naive, but when I see companies that work like this I assume they either don't know any better or are just scared stupid. Or perhaps it is a macho startup thing.
- jeanhsu 16y ago
  I don't think it's either of those--I think it's a natural progression of a startup whose composition is pretty much entirely of young people straight out of school who don't have as many obligations outside of work, as say, someone with a spouse and kids (I have a spouse, but no kids). We're all trying to get on better schedules, and my post was was in no way a criticism of how things are run at Pulse.
skotzko 16y ago
I see some references to family throughout the comments, but one fundamental thing is that things are different once you have a family. The founder of our startup always goes home to have dinner w/ his wife and kids, but it would be a complete mistake to say he's slacking -- he works late into the night from home. Steve Blank wrote a great post about how to navigate this tricky balance of startup/family and what worked for him. It's here: http://steveblank.com/2009/06/18/epitaph-for-an-entrepreneur/ http://steveblank.com/2009/06/18/epitaph-for-an-entrepreneur...
heat_miser 16y ago
The most important thing for founders to remember, even if they are under the gun is that keeping employees working longer hours for a sustained duration will result in a less reliable product. I have tried to work 80-100 hours on several occasions for a month or so and just ended up ripping up most of what I wrote. I have settled into an average of about a 65 hour workweek by picking up the laptop whenever I feel like it and stopping when I feel the pointless churn beginning. My output, as measured by Pivotal Tracker is much higher working less hours, point being my meaningful productivity is higher. If I had an employee working that much of their own volition, I would start offer help on their process and would want to work with them on why they are approaching things in such a brute-force manner. I would also see it as a failure on my part to set the right expectations with customers, investors, etc... Work/Life balance is relative, but I don't think anyone can sustain a quality output at 80 hours a week for more than 3 weeks or so.

58 points by jeanhsu 16y ago

I'm involved in a startup since 9 months ago. After the first 3 months wich were loaded with tons of work, long hours and a lot of stress someone told me to categorize the work on my todo-list, to think about wich tasks i could delegate to others and to filter the most important ones (a common model for this wich helped me a lot can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_management#The_Eisenhower_Method http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_management#The_Eisenhower_...). Now I still have a lot to do, but i can manage to take a day off from time to time, i even went skiing for 4 days without working there. In my opinion people lose their attitude and motivation if they dont take time to do something besides working and think about other things.

patio11 16y ago

I spoke to someone a few months ago, and what I remember most vividly about the conversation was when he said, "once your team starts going home for dinner, you know you're in trouble." This is an example of a social pathology on two levels. First, it means that working for that one particular company sucks. Second, it is being deployed to make working sucks normative at other companies, too. (And if it gets widely repeated by credulous entrepreneurs, it will infect their lives, their employees lives, etc etc. The viral factor of suck in the social graph has exceeded k = 1.0, watch out!) It has not been my experience that the narrative this social pathology tells about work being necessarily all-consuming has basis in objective reality. I've done all-consuming work. My business' schedule doesn't resemble that schedule even a little itty-bitty bit.

robryan 16y ago
Your ideas are designed around being able to do business like this, rightly or wrongly others go into over ambitious ideas undermanned and the long hours are probably the only way they are going to pull it off.
- patio11 16y ago
  This assumes that working more hours actually makes you produce more value, which is highly non-obvious to me. I didn't produce twice as much stuff when I was working twice as many hours. I'm not even sure net output decreased since radically cutting hours. Mythical man month, etc.
  - Tyrannosaurs 16y ago
    Obviously it depends on the nature of the work but I believe the research actually supports this position. Certainly my experience of coding is that you can do extra hours for a short while and get some benefit but more than a couple of weeks and that starts falling away pretty rapidly. Even in the short term though it's limited. Beyond midnight (assuming that I've started at 9am-ish and worked relatively solidly) I'm pretty much breaking as much as I'm fixing, plus I tend to be setting myself up for a pretty significant productivity hit the day after.
    - yummyfajitas 16y ago
      The trick is to do difficult work early, and save the easy/boring grunt work for the 8-midnight period.
      - Tyrannosaurs 16y ago
        Interesting. Personally I find the more boring the work the more likely I am to mess it up when tired. At least something tricky gives you some mental stimulation which helps you push through the tiredness and stay focused (or as focused as you can be). Sure there are those days when you're knackered so you just tidy your inbox, sort out your expenses and so on but most people really don't have that much work of that nature to do.
- jjm 16y ago
  Here here. If your guys can't get it done in a normal timeframe they never will. Especially so if your guys are already working 70 hrs/week. Adding another 20 won't help you. Go back to the drawing board, plan better, go MVP for each iteration etc...
revorad 16y ago
Patrick, I think you are well aware that much of the difference between your views on this issue and those of the majority of the startup community stems from a fundamental disagreement on the definition of a startup. As you pointed out yesterday (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2382580 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2382580), we waste too much time on naming things. So, why don't we simply agree that you are in a different business than the OP's company? You are a one-man operation who scales by outsourcing; they are a team who scale by hiring through investment ($1M). You want careful, measured growth; they want superfast growth, whatever the cost. You are an efficient time manager, who's built "passive" income and chooses to spend a lot of time on HN just for fun; they work crazy hours in the hope of making it really big some day, even if the personal cost today is high. I'm sure a typical overworked startup could benefit from adopting some of your ways, but it is equally hard for them to see your point as it is for you to see theirs. You haven't been on the other side.
- profquail 16y ago
  they work crazy hours in the hope of making it really big some day, even if the personal cost today is high. When you say, "they", you're talking about entrepreneurs who have made a personal choice to make that sacrifice; or, a team of entrepreneurs who have agreed, amongst themselves, to all make that sacrifice together. I read Patrick's argument as railing against the kind of "entrepreneurs" who are really just free-loading, glorified managers that get angry when anyone on the team starts "slacking" (i.e., working less than 80-100 hours / week) because they're relying on the hard work of other people to bring them their fortune instead of actually doing anything themselves.
  - revorad 16y ago
    I don't think founders are conning employees to exploit them. Employees should be well aware of what they are getting into. There are plenty of well-paying normal jobs available out there.
- zasz 16y ago
  Patrick is talking about his life as a Japanese salaryman, where 12 (14?) hour workdays are the daily norm at his company, and, if I recall correctly, there are no weekends. He is not talking about Bingo Card Creator.

jdee 16y ago

It's not a pipedream. We run a dev team that is both productive and enthused about the work we do. Every single engineer is out the door by 6, unless there is something that needs completing urgently. We are constantly shipping new versions of our product, are very profitable and have a minute churn rate of developers. My gut feeling is that developers who cultivate a lifestyle that will inevitably lead to them burning out are either drinking the koolaid of some kind of cliched' notion of how developers should perform, or are simply being exploited by their employers. Everyone has a right to see their family and keep fit, and in this sellers market, developers CAN work at a sustainable pace that doesnt put their future careers at stake.

arethuza 16y ago
Isn't it arguably a component to "startup" culture that maximizes apparent effort (which is easy to measure) rather than actual productivity - which is very difficult to measure objectively. Note: I have founded startups (a long time ago now) that very much went with the traditional startup culture but have also worked at small new companies that didn't have this culture at all but still did pretty well.

whyleym 16y ago

I founded a startup with my brother 5 years ago - we launched in my two weeks paternity leave from work. For the first 4 years we both held down full time jobs and worked on our startup every evening. I had my 2nd child when the startup turned 4 any my brother had his first around the same time. I'm not sure if it's because we are family, but we've always had a policy (not written down or set in stone) but that if one of us wants some time off then we do. We pretty much do normal hours (10 - 6), we still work a few evenings, but we're now both full time so haven't got the added stress of a 'day job'. It was always our dream to be able to work full time on our startup and now that's a reality there is honestly no other job i'd rather be doing. We both get to see our kids everyday, i'm due to be taking my eldest (4) swimming at lunch. Based on my experience (every startup is different), we do live and breath it, but at the same time we always make time for family, holidays and anything else we want to do (taking the kids for days out, nursery, the gym). Our startup is actually doing better than ever and I personally feel that because we put in all the work in the first few years whilst holding down a full time job we are now in a position to be able to enjoy the fruits of our labour and have a great work/life balance.

maxer 16y ago

I disagree with a few comments here- if i go home I am just going to play xbox, would it not be spent better writing code? Plus I enjoy what I do in the office, it can be stressful but its not like 12-16 hours hard physical labour. I dont work weekends though other than answer email or support requests

jjm 16y ago
You can (and probably will) burn out at that rate. I've heard this argument many times, and of those times 50% of burn outs left the industry.
brown9-2 16y ago
if i go home I am just going to play xbox, would it not be spent better writing code? You need to quantify what "better" means here to even begin to answer this question: - better for your mental health to take a break or have some fun? - better for your code quality to not introduce mistakes due to tiredness? - better from some economic standpoint because you petceive the increased value in what you produce to be greater than what you value xbox-time at?
grammaton 16y ago
Perhaps you're a workaholic. If so, I wouldn't be surprised that the idea of just unwinding for a while seems strange and alien. If you don't want to do it more power to you, but to those that do - they tend to think of it as an investment in their health.

deleted 16y ago

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ibagrak 16y ago

What I found is that passion is one of those things that always seems excessive in retrospect and insufficient going forward. When I reflect on my periods of professional exuberance, I am always struck by how much I missed out being with my family and friends. Likewise, in the times of lull I am always guilt tripping myself about not being passionate enough, or not giving it my all. Ultimately, the right balance depends on your own perspective on life, which in term depends on your age, personality, family situation, etc. But the older I get the more convinced I become that you can't go wrong if you err on the side of life.

jasonkester 16y ago

Work/Life Balance is fundamentally a personal thing. If you make it a priority, you can take it with you anywhere you go. When I talk to a potential employer, I make a point of telling them that I work 40 hour weeks and I take a lot of time off. I've gone so far as to negotiate away my stock options in favor of extra paid holiday and the ability to take unpaid leave. Even when working for startups that think they're in crunch mode (and have been for the last 6 months), I make Life a priority. Where I can, I try to spread the faith. Surprisingly, I've never experienced a case where I couldn't fix things and had to leave. Stress is infectious. But so is Sanity. I've walked into shops where 60 hour weeks were the norm and managed to infect the team with the concept of Work/Life balance. First, you introduce the idea of "the weekend", where I'm living the back of my truck next to a crag someplace (and so should you), so don't try to contact me. Then you bring in "leave at six", then eventually "40 hour weeks". All the while keeping the rest of the team on board with the idea that maybe we should have lives apart from work. Eventually, you have a whole team working 40 hour weeks and not looking so unhealthy. Some of whom even have stories to tell when you ask what they did for the weekend. Better still, if everybody is slacking off at a sane pace, there's really nothing that management can do about it (except notice how much more work is getting done).

pm 16y ago
Congratulations, this is how it should be. I run a business and have managed to hire people who come in late, leave at the regular time and still get more than enough done. I mostly work weekends, but I'm a masochist. I don't wish it on my employees. They need to have a life.
jeanhsu 16y ago
Glad to hear this perspective, as a lot of early comments were on the other end of the spectrum. Still finding my way in startup world, but it's encouraging to hear others who have been there and managed to make it work!

madaxe 16y ago

Balance is a pipedream. Success is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration - glib, but true. We started 5 years ago - I've been on call 24/7 ever since. We've now got other people on call too, sure, but as the technical lead, I'm where the buck stops. An average week is in the region of 70-80 hours work. I have precious little in the way of "life" - I allow myself a few hours off once a week on Thursdays, but apart from that, spend my time glued to my laptop, growing the business. That said, I see several ways out. 1) This sucker actually works, and we retire. 2) This sucker actually works, and we grow it into a behemoth. 3) Ditto and we sell, and I re-invest the proceeds into my next mad idea. 1 is pretty unlikely. 2&3 are far more likely, which rather reflects the fact that my work is my life, and if you're doing a startup without that attitude, it's going to suffer. A startup is effectively all about selling a "regular" 20/30's for a decade (or two) of brutally hard work, high stress, and attaining financial and inventive freedom. Sorry, I'm rambling. No coffee yet this morning.

dschobel 16y ago
1 is pretty unlikely. 2&3 are far more likely It's funny you say "more likely" when the odds are still, to be blunt, stacked against you (I'm not trying to be a jerk, but you probably realize it's all still a longshot). Ultimately I think your value function has to heavily and positively weight the work you're doing for 12 hours a day. If you're missing your free time I don't see how any rational person can voluntarily continue working those hours.
- madaxe 16y ago
  Ah, but I don't miss the free time, partially because I've rationally weighed up short-term costs against long-term benefits, and partially because I've come to realise that I actually enjoy working myself to the bone - hence the probability that even after this, I'll likely put myself straight back into the grinder with something new. As to 2&3 - we've already had a few substantial (8 figure, cash) offers for the business, but we've passed them up, as they were the wrong buyers at the wrong time.
  - correij 16y ago

nsoonhui 16y ago

I have been involving in a startup since one year ago. Result: I broke one relationship, and missed another. When my mom came visiting me from another state I didn't have the time to bring her around, and not even the time to talk to her. When everyone is enjoying the weekends I have to lock myself in my room and code, code CODE. When everyone is enjoying TVs after coming back from work, I read emails, filter resumes and do other work related stuffs. I don't have personal life; all of my time is consumed by this one little startup which may or may not work in the future. Now you know why relationship won't work for me at this stage of time? So whenever someone told me that they could have a nice work/life balance at a startup, I smiled. And when girls told me that they would support their husbands in pursuing their dreams at all cost, I could only conclude that they didn't know what they wish for. They haven't seen the true cost of startup, yet.

WA 16y ago
There is a difference between "I didn't have time" and "I didn't want to spend time". It is entirely up to you and you decided to not have time for them, but for your startup. Or put another way: You decided for the part in you that wants to work on the startup instead of the part in you that wants to deal with your mother or your girlfriend. When I read something like this, I sometimes wonder what the intention of people of running a startup is. Is it really about creating an app? The app/startup will be forgotten at some point in time anyways. So why are you doing it, if it isn't for the personal freedom that comes along with a startup (eventually) and that enables you to spend more time with the people you care about? I mean, it is just a startup. The people might care to some degree about your product, but they don't care about you at all and you shouldn't care too much either. I know that the "work hard" mantra is ridiculously widespread in the startup culture and especially in the US and I also know the feeling that one's mind always comes up with new ideas, whether you want it or not. However, I prefer to work on my startup 5 to 10 hours a week, just enough to get decent money from it, be ahead of competitors and make plans or delegate the work that needs to be done. I think the real trick in startups is not to spend as much time as possible, but as few time as possible and still get good results. At least, that is how it works for me and how it supports the general idea, why I run a startup at all: to increase my personal freedom.

wheels 16y ago

I think the question is entirely different for founders and employees. For founders, the question loses some of its meaning, because the company itself is intrinsically tied to personal goals. Founders tend to not refer to the company as "a job". It's something of a different beast. This doesn't mean that some time doing non-company stuff won't ever be required to maintain sanity, but the dynamics are pretty different. For employees, which this post seems to be about, you're ultimately working to fulfill someone else's personal goals. There it makes a lot more sense to balance working on your own personal goals and pastimes or whatever with working on the goals of the person who's signing your paychecks. The problem is that if there's a sufficient supply of employees who are willing to forgo that for whatever reason (loving the work, not having much of a life, peer pressure) then they're more likely to be favored by the employers with the implications that go along with that.

jeanhsu 16y ago
Yes, I'd imagine it'd be quite different for employees and founders. I don't know if I'm willing to make that kind of sacrifice though--maybe that means I'm not cut out to be a founder. Or maybe I haven't found the right opportunity yet.

zyfo 16y ago

I don't get this. On the one hand there's the 40h-a-week camp, backed up by plenty of research [1] and on the other hand there's the work-as-much-as-you-possibly-can camp, which seems to be what plenty of successful startup have been following. So what's the deal? Why this discrepancy? It's not about manual vs knowledge working - studies on knowledge workers show that even less than 40h / week is beneficial. Is it about the difference in possible leverage? Self-directed work? The close link between work and payoff? The stressful situation in a startup? The 100% commitment? Any attempts to pin down why and under what circumstances [2] different work hour guidelines should apply would be greatly appreciated. 1: See studies in this pdf http://www.lostgarden.com/2008/09/rules-of-productivity-presentation.html http://www.lostgarden.com/2008/09/rules-of-productivity-pres... 2: What's the difference between starting your own company, running your own company, joining a startup, doing a PhD, being in a research team, working at an established startup?

JanezStupar 16y ago
It could be that successful startups succeed in spite of overtime not because of it. Also a lot of successful startups are done by (young) people who haven't had their asses handed to them because of their insane work ethics. There indeed are stretches when one gets carried by passion and can work (almost) 24/7. One should use that wave. But when you find yourself disliking what you're doing you better stop and not write posts as in the OP. OP is just making up excuses for feeling of guilt one feels divided between family and promise they made to themselves/somebody else. To me it seems like excuses fat people have about losing weight - or drunks about stopping drinking (when catch yourself saying - shit x is wrong and I dislike shit y in my life, but I'm still doing great - some red lights should start spinning). To OP if you're reading this - look into mirror take a deep breath and admit that you're a workaholic. There are some "mommy" and "daddy" issues in your soul you need to resolve. You're using your work to punish yourself for something you're not even guilty of.

brown9-2 16y ago

Until someone can prove that more hours = more value, I refuse to believe this "startup mentality" is anything but a cargo cult mentality. Weird for a culture that so prizes data and science to endlessly repeat certain mantras as truth without any validation.

grammaton 16y ago
I think a lot of it comes from people reading certain luminaries - our own beloved Paul Graham comes to mind - who have good points, but not exercising critical judgement about whether said points apply to one's own situation.

wslh 16y ago

I believe that beyond work/life balance there is a difference between hard work and madness. Many startups (and companies) need to go to a psychiatric hospital, they are very unorganized and the team leaders doesn't take full responsability and respect for people times. Another thing is being really focused and concentrated on moving forward in your 40 hours week (not checking HN too much...) and doing extra hours when it's really necessary.

webjunkie 16y ago

If your team cannot wait to leave at 6 you have a problem, but if you send your team home at 6 because they worked efficiently and achieved something, that's some work life balance then.

jonnycat 16y ago

I don't dare to make any sweeping generalizations about this, but I would love to see how age, location and amount of time spent working at startups correlates with some of the opinions here. I suspect there might be some interesting (if not entirely unsurprising) trends there.

naner 16y ago

Perhaps I'm naive, but when I see companies that work like this I assume they either don't know any better or are just scared stupid. Or perhaps it is a macho startup thing.

jeanhsu 16y ago
I don't think it's either of those--I think it's a natural progression of a startup whose composition is pretty much entirely of young people straight out of school who don't have as many obligations outside of work, as say, someone with a spouse and kids (I have a spouse, but no kids). We're all trying to get on better schedules, and my post was was in no way a criticism of how things are run at Pulse.

skotzko 16y ago

I see some references to family throughout the comments, but one fundamental thing is that things are different once you have a family. The founder of our startup always goes home to have dinner w/ his wife and kids, but it would be a complete mistake to say he's slacking -- he works late into the night from home. Steve Blank wrote a great post about how to navigate this tricky balance of startup/family and what worked for him. It's here: http://steveblank.com/2009/06/18/epitaph-for-an-entrepreneur/ http://steveblank.com/2009/06/18/epitaph-for-an-entrepreneur...

heat_miser 16y ago

The most important thing for founders to remember, even if they are under the gun is that keeping employees working longer hours for a sustained duration will result in a less reliable product. I have tried to work 80-100 hours on several occasions for a month or so and just ended up ripping up most of what I wrote. I have settled into an average of about a 65 hour workweek by picking up the laptop whenever I feel like it and stopping when I feel the pointless churn beginning. My output, as measured by Pivotal Tracker is much higher working less hours, point being my meaningful productivity is higher. If I had an employee working that much of their own volition, I would start offer help on their process and would want to work with them on why they are approaching things in such a brute-force manner. I would also see it as a failure on my part to set the right expectations with customers, investors, etc... Work/Life balance is relative, but I don't think anyone can sustain a quality output at 80 hours a week for more than 3 weeks or so.