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> I was deciding whether this venture was worth committing to another year of 70+ hour weeks. I need a higher level of certainty than investors do because my ti

• jokoon 4y ago
  70h per week, I really can't imagine a world where I could accept this. Sometimes I try to imagine how the alternative would be in a planned economy for software. On one hand, it would be very slow and very inefficient. But on the other hand, venture capitalism also has its flaws. Sometimes it sounds like there is an "excess efficiency" that leads to burnout and non-sense, where you constantly need to quote-unquote "innovate". In my view there is a limit about innovation, you can't always "disrupt" over and over and over again. If I get paid that much money, I'm going to work on my own terms, there is no way somebody will compromise my health like that.
  • Aeolun 4y ago
    > 70h per week, I really can't imagine a world where I could accept this. On my own company, when single, and living in my one room apartment? Absolutely. With a family, children, with tons of responsibilities and in someone elses employ? Not on your life.
    • the_common_man 4y ago
      I dislike this trope of a single person having nothing better to do than work. Single people have responsibilities too and have quality lives. They don't need to work themselves to death
      • sgt 4y ago
        Sure, but if the alternative (for you) is to waste time in front of the TV or gaming, it may be a valid point.
        • wrren 4y ago
          I wouldn’t consider those things to be a waste of time at all…
        • leetrout 4y ago
          Careful there -- relaxing or enjoying something mundane is not wasting time. We have been conditioned to call things like this a waste of time but it doesnt mean it is. Not for everyone. Capitalism would have us believe we must constantly be delivering value that is defined by external standards but that is a dangerous game. 4000 Weeks is a pretty good book with more on this topic.
          • brokenkebab2 4y ago
            Gaming, and watching TV sometimes may not be complete waste of time. But both are addictive, and can easyly make your life miserable.
            • mathgeek 4y ago
              This isn’t really relevant to the current discussion about how much extra time is spent on “work” beyond normal working hours. Working ~40 hours a week and choosing to spend most of your other conscious hours consuming media is a different situation from spending most/all of your hours on the latter.
              • mmmpop 4y ago
                https://i.redd.it/3hn1jb4p3ih41.jpg https://i.redd.it/3hn1jb4p3ih41.jpg
              • brokenkebab2 4y ago
    • wruza 4y ago
      On my own company, when single, and living in my one room apartment? Absolutely. If you’re around 20 maybe. Before you’ve already developed a hair-trigger on chronic disorders.
    • crabbygrabby 4y ago
      In the US 70 hr work weeks at startups and even certain industry's are not abnormal. Are those people usually making good decisions, thinking clearly, and not being jerks? Nope, but it's what a lot of people willingly do. I've seen people pull 80 hr weeks
    • actionablefiber 4y ago
      > On my own company, when single, and living in my one room apartment? Absolutely. Speak for yourself. I have hobbies, a workout routine, friends to meet up with, family members to visit, and beauty sleep to catch. If you're working 70h a week you're sacrificing most if not all of those things.
      • literallycancer 4y ago
        He already said he was single. You can have a workout routine and plenty of sleep even when working 70h weeks. Just skip the Netflix and other people, for a time.
        • actionablefiber 4y ago
          I'm single too... I don't see the relevance, though. You don't just have to like working. You have to actively decide against doing much of anything else. If you are working ten hours a day with no weekend, or 14 hours a day with one, you're going to be exhausted for the rest of that time. You can fit working out in there (~30-60 min a day, plus travel time if you don't have your own equipment) if you're willing to burn the candle at both ends like that. At that point you will have committed the overwhelming majority of your time, and if you try to add anything else to your life, any kind of unexpected outing or emergency, or even just waking up one day and not feeling up for it, will have to come directly out of the time you've budgeted for your work and health.
          • literallycancer 4y ago
            I forgot that some people still commute. I assumed that you have an office in your residence and a gym in the garden. You will have committed most of your time, yes. Still at least in my experience it let me do more in a quarter than in a year of taking it easy. You can retire after a few years, which should still be early enough to enjoy life.
  • andrepd 4y ago
    > Sometimes I try to imagine how the alternative would be in a planned economy for software. > On one hand, it would be very slow and very inefficient. Why do you say that? Large, "boring" sectors of the economy would probably work just fine being algorithmically steered.
    • brokenkebab2 4y ago
      Because there are 0 successful examples for it. And as someone born in USSR let me say if you like to experiment with planned economy you better choose a country nobody will regret leaving in dust afterwards
      • andrepd 4y ago
        That's not a good reasoning, there were 0 successful examples of democracy for millenia, until stable Western democracies emerged. Anyways, more concretely: huge vertically integrated megacorporations behave much like centrally planned economies, and they seek to be doing just finem
        • brokenkebab2 4y ago
          Your first argument could be somewhat interesting point for debates if the latest planned economy attempt were some hundreds years ago. The second one is no argument at all: planned economy is a radical departure from the feedback loop of the current economy within which all corporations operate.
    • Aerroon 4y ago
      Because they wouldn't be. A planned economy just takes the power of business owners and adds it to the pile of power politicians have. These algorithms would just 'happen' to suggest things favorable to those in charge.
    • jokoon 4y ago
      I said that to appeal to the HN crowds. Computing and software was researched and invented in a planned manner (NASA etc). Maybe you can't "expand" and "generalize" software in a planned economy, if you want everything to be made with software. The article talks about about 80 competitors, so it can easily be said something should be planned.
  • quickthrower2 4y ago
    I have never done a 70h week. probably 50h the top. I think it would be impossible for me. I mean I could be physically in an office for that long… but that is not the same thing.
    • jimnotgym 4y ago
      It's impossible, that's why. I have seen people in my role work a lot more hours than me, but not to turn out more work than me.
  • javajosh 4y ago
    >70h per week, I really can't imagine a world where I could accept this. I can think of several. The grandiose ones: your kid has cancer, the kind that might be fixable, but there is no treatment, and you have to design one. You have a viable theory for nuclear fusion or carbon sequestration and need to get funding for and then perform the experiment. There is a verified meteor/comet strike and there's some hope of saving people underground, but it needs to be built and stocked. In reality, you don't need grandiosity. This life is 'acceptable' to a lot of people, especially small business owners, the store owner/operator, or car mechanic, who effectively lives at their store. For others there is "paying your dues", doctors doing a residency, grad students doing slave labor on something only tangentially related to their degree. For others, like farmers, they work like this for some part of the year, every year.
    • jokoon 4y ago
      all those example don't apply to digital contract software. if someone is passionate about their job, I'm not sure they're being well paid, or they also have very rare skills, so it's an exception, not a rule. also I live in a country with good healthcare.
  • nonameiguess 4y ago
    For how long? Not that I think it's healthy or anyone should do this, but for most of the past two decades, American military services regularly deployed units of thousands at a time for 15 months overseas, during which they worked up to 20 hour days with 2 hours of sleep, 7 days a week for the entire 15 months. And they did this with zero chance or expectation that they might get rich, also knowing there was quite a good chance they'd end up permanently disabled. For better or worse, devotion to a cause is a proven motivator of human action. As for alternatives in the business world, we'd need some economic system that wasn't analogous to warfare in which one firm outcompetes all others to take most of the winnings. If you want a lesson from the US losing in Afghanistan, and arguably losing in Iraq, in spite of being able to drive its labor force to such extreme exertion, consider that a massive advantage of the insurgency was their ability to mobilize a part-time gig-based workforce that mostly worked from home. But which lesson does business learn from that? Allow work from home? Or getting part-time contractors with no benefits to kill themselves and sacrifice children for you?
• totetsu 4y ago
  Move over poster of New Zealand's fishes.
  • damagednoob 4y ago
    New Zealand. Why not?
• d4rkp4ttern 4y ago
  Love this quote. As a cynical counterpoint to all the apparent glamour to being a CEO of a small startup, especially one that has taken investor money, I came up with this expansion: CEO = Chief Enslaved Officer. Enslaved to your investor obviously. Enslaved to your customers. And even enslaved to your employees. This one may need some elaboration — the CEO constantly needs to manage their motivation through ups and downs and ensure they are productive, and be responsive to them.
  • d4rkp4ttern 4y ago
    Actually I would improve this to: CEO = Cheap, Enslaved Officer. For obvious reasons — CEOs intentionally take very little if any pay.
    • lasc4r 4y ago
      Yeah, no.
  • mandmandam 4y ago
    I hope you're very careful about who you throw slavery metaphors around with. Anyone with not-too-distant relatives that were _owned_ by wealthy old white dudes may find the equating of CEOs with slavery an "I have no time for this person" level offense.
    • zdragnar 4y ago
      This silly notion that there has only ever been a single form of slavery, and that there's no point in discussing any other than what occurred in America in a specific time period is so very harmful. I understand why the topic at large is a sensitive one, and more for some than others. That doesn't mean I'll be overly concerned with someone who responds to such an analogy with some variation of "I have no time for you".
      • afarrell 4y ago
        As someone who does have Black enslaved ancestors: Sure, we can discuss comparisons among transatlantic chattel slavery, the treatment of the helots, or the people trafficked south along the Volga. The problem with a CEO calling themselves a slave is that it pretends that someone who has made an active choice to start a company is a victim. As this article shows, a CEO can choose to walk away from their company without fear of violence or starvation. If I meet a CEO who labels themselves enslaved, that tells me they are unwilling to recognize their responsibility for their own choices. That mindset makes them unfit to hold the power of the leadership position they aspire to.
• effingwewt 4y ago
  Funny to me that these are seen as novel concepts, and all over the comments are people going on about how this is so true for founders. What about the workers actually building the product, making far less, and probably putting in more time. Why is the issue of their valuable time compared to money almost never discussed. We all only have one life and ot should be able to be enjoyed. Why do we always forget the pursuit of happiness, except as it applies to the upper class.