4 ms·

I think everyone criticizing this is comparing it to the wrong thing. Many ambitious students: -graduate and work 100 hour+ weeks as investment banking associa

I think everyone criticizing this is comparing it to the wrong thing. Many ambitious students: -graduate and work 100 hour+ weeks as investment banking associates. -join other people's startups where they work crazy hours -work hellish hours in PhDs/med school/law school Yes, being a founder is hard and can be absolute hell at times. But so are some of the "normal" things ambitious students already do post-graduation. It's not like YC is saying you either do an internship with free lunches, corporate yoga classes and kombucha on tap or you dive into the trenches of being a YC founder.

doctorpangloss 1y ago
speaking only for recent graduates I know personally well: ambitious students also want to be writers, for example. If only it were so easy as writing more makes you a better writer! So if you have to sit around and get life experiences that are interesting to write about (a good way to be a good writer), do you want to do that while working for Stripe, drinking kombucha and getting free lunches and being able to live in New York? Yes. You don’t want to do that while being an investment banker or a doctor or a YC founder. The thing is those kids still have massive cognitive gifts - I’m not going to use a loaded word like talented or whatever - and have worked very hard in the past. It’s just that the journey to the thing they want to do no longer rewards hours. Paul Graham is like the Mr. Beast of seed investing. He wants to make the best SEED STAGE INVESTMENTS in the world, to mock a Mr. Beast PowerPoint. He doesn’t want to get the kids with the highest potential, or the kids who work the hardest. They are very sincere and supportive - I mean, who the hell in your life is willing to risk $525,000 on an idea with no traction?? - but they are not out to anoint a category of kids as the “ambitious” ones versus the unambitious ones. You can be ambitious about being a writer and find success and wind up writing very little!
- FinnLobsien 1y ago
  > speaking only for recent graduates I know personally well: ambitious students also want to be writers, for example. If only it were so easy as writing more makes you a better writer! So if you have to sit around and get life experiences that are interesting to write about (a good way to be a good writer), do you want to do that while working for Stripe, drinking kombucha and getting free lunches and being able to live in New York? Yes. You don’t want to do that while being an investment banker or a doctor or a YC founder. But nobody's closing that option, are they? YC is simply offering another path. There are different kinds of ambitions of course. Not all of them are about money, some are about creative fulfillment or family or whatever. That's totally true. But it's not like anyone's yanking those people out of their kombucha-on-tap associate job and forcing them into YC.
- Kranar 1y ago
  > If only it were so easy as writing more makes you a better writer! One commonly repeated piece of advice that almost all successful authors state is to write a lot, a lot, a lot. Like just practice writing, it doesn't have to be good. I hear this often said about many other creative endeavors as well, including painting, cooking, game development/design, etc... It often seems like really good artisans just pull greatness out of thin air, but that's because we often only see the successes, not the failures, but I am reminded that even the best writers, poets, and artists in general spend a great amount of time just creating content that no one will ever see.
snowmaker 1y ago
Yes, this is an excellent point.
- fakedang 1y ago
  No it isn't. I, and many I know, would never trade away 100+ hours at a namebrand investment bank/PE firm/consulting firm to work 100+ hours at a startup. It's not what I would recommend nor is it what many people I know would recommend, some of whom are billionaires. The constant advice is to always work at the best possible opportunity the first few years of your career, then step into entrepreneurship. You'll then have an idea of things actually work in the world. And I say this as someone who went the other way around (startup first before working in corporate).
3pt14159 1y ago
I'm sorry but only at my most very dedicated periods of work did I work 100 hour weeks, and that was like 3 or 4 weeks tops. I highly doubt that anyone sustains a 100 hour work week for much longer. Eighty hour work weeks? Sure, that is doable, but sleeping at the job site because you are pulling a 100 hour work week is just not sustainable.
- Kranar 1y ago
  Rules changed in 2003, but until then medical residency programs routinely had doctors working 100+ hours a week or longer. In 2003 a cap of 80 hours a week was instituted along with a maximum of 24 hours in any given period, but programs found various loopholes around that cap which still had doctors working close to 100 hours a week. So further restrictions were placed so that over any 4 week period there's a hard cap of 320 hours, no exceptions. At any rate, for most of the HN crowd who work a fairly routine IT or an office job, 80+ hours sustained for months and months might seem impossible, but join the military, work on a ship, work on a farm, work the oil fields, work in investment banking, work in a film crew which threatened to go on strike in 2021 for having 98 hour work weeks for months on end... and you find that while it's not common, it certainly happens in various fields.
  - JambalayaJimbo 1y ago
    Are residents and people working on ships actually making decisions for 100 hours a week? It's the cognitive load that I find difficult to believe about these numbers, not the At one point I was also working crazy hours at a fast food shop. But that was only possible because I could "zone out" and just pour the customer's coffee and make sandwiches. Writing code for that long would have been impossible.
    - trenchpilgrim 1y ago
      > Are residents and people working on ships actually making decisions for 100 hours a week? Residencies? Yeah. The guy who came up with the US' system for medical residency was high on cocaine pretty much constantly and expected everyone to perform at his level. https://www.wolterskluwer.com/en/expert-insights/a-day-in-the-life-of-a-resident https://www.wolterskluwer.com/en/expert-insights/a-day-in-th... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Stewart_Halsted https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Stewart_Halsted

doctorpangloss 1y ago

speaking only for recent graduates I know personally well: ambitious students also want to be writers, for example. If only it were so easy as writing more makes you a better writer! So if you have to sit around and get life experiences that are interesting to write about (a good way to be a good writer), do you want to do that while working for Stripe, drinking kombucha and getting free lunches and being able to live in New York? Yes. You don’t want to do that while being an investment banker or a doctor or a YC founder. The thing is those kids still have massive cognitive gifts - I’m not going to use a loaded word like talented or whatever - and have worked very hard in the past. It’s just that the journey to the thing they want to do no longer rewards hours. Paul Graham is like the Mr. Beast of seed investing. He wants to make the best SEED STAGE INVESTMENTS in the world, to mock a Mr. Beast PowerPoint. He doesn’t want to get the kids with the highest potential, or the kids who work the hardest. They are very sincere and supportive - I mean, who the hell in your life is willing to risk $525,000 on an idea with no traction?? - but they are not out to anoint a category of kids as the “ambitious” ones versus the unambitious ones. You can be ambitious about being a writer and find success and wind up writing very little!

FinnLobsien 1y ago
> speaking only for recent graduates I know personally well: ambitious students also want to be writers, for example. If only it were so easy as writing more makes you a better writer! So if you have to sit around and get life experiences that are interesting to write about (a good way to be a good writer), do you want to do that while working for Stripe, drinking kombucha and getting free lunches and being able to live in New York? Yes. You don’t want to do that while being an investment banker or a doctor or a YC founder. But nobody's closing that option, are they? YC is simply offering another path. There are different kinds of ambitions of course. Not all of them are about money, some are about creative fulfillment or family or whatever. That's totally true. But it's not like anyone's yanking those people out of their kombucha-on-tap associate job and forcing them into YC.
Kranar 1y ago
> If only it were so easy as writing more makes you a better writer! One commonly repeated piece of advice that almost all successful authors state is to write a lot, a lot, a lot. Like just practice writing, it doesn't have to be good. I hear this often said about many other creative endeavors as well, including painting, cooking, game development/design, etc... It often seems like really good artisans just pull greatness out of thin air, but that's because we often only see the successes, not the failures, but I am reminded that even the best writers, poets, and artists in general spend a great amount of time just creating content that no one will ever see.

snowmaker 1y ago

Yes, this is an excellent point.

fakedang 1y ago
No it isn't. I, and many I know, would never trade away 100+ hours at a namebrand investment bank/PE firm/consulting firm to work 100+ hours at a startup. It's not what I would recommend nor is it what many people I know would recommend, some of whom are billionaires. The constant advice is to always work at the best possible opportunity the first few years of your career, then step into entrepreneurship. You'll then have an idea of things actually work in the world. And I say this as someone who went the other way around (startup first before working in corporate).

3pt14159 1y ago

I'm sorry but only at my most very dedicated periods of work did I work 100 hour weeks, and that was like 3 or 4 weeks tops. I highly doubt that anyone sustains a 100 hour work week for much longer. Eighty hour work weeks? Sure, that is doable, but sleeping at the job site because you are pulling a 100 hour work week is just not sustainable.

Kranar 1y ago
Rules changed in 2003, but until then medical residency programs routinely had doctors working 100+ hours a week or longer. In 2003 a cap of 80 hours a week was instituted along with a maximum of 24 hours in any given period, but programs found various loopholes around that cap which still had doctors working close to 100 hours a week. So further restrictions were placed so that over any 4 week period there's a hard cap of 320 hours, no exceptions. At any rate, for most of the HN crowd who work a fairly routine IT or an office job, 80+ hours sustained for months and months might seem impossible, but join the military, work on a ship, work on a farm, work the oil fields, work in investment banking, work in a film crew which threatened to go on strike in 2021 for having 98 hour work weeks for months on end... and you find that while it's not common, it certainly happens in various fields.
- JambalayaJimbo 1y ago
  Are residents and people working on ships actually making decisions for 100 hours a week? It's the cognitive load that I find difficult to believe about these numbers, not the At one point I was also working crazy hours at a fast food shop. But that was only possible because I could "zone out" and just pour the customer's coffee and make sandwiches. Writing code for that long would have been impossible.
  - trenchpilgrim 1y ago
    > Are residents and people working on ships actually making decisions for 100 hours a week? Residencies? Yeah. The guy who came up with the US' system for medical residency was high on cocaine pretty much constantly and expected everyone to perform at his level. https://www.wolterskluwer.com/en/expert-insights/a-day-in-the-life-of-a-resident https://www.wolterskluwer.com/en/expert-insights/a-day-in-th... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Stewart_Halsted https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Stewart_Halsted