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I think it's important not to reason in absolutes. Taking an obviously multi-person, multi-year project like Starcraft and arbitrarily setting a 2-month deadlin

by eliben 14y ago

I think it's important not to reason in absolutes. Taking an obviously multi-person, multi-year project like Starcraft and arbitrarily setting a 2-month deadline "because some code is there from Warcraft II" is not good use of crunch-time. If you and a friend have an idea and can pull out a prototype in a week, then overworking that week may be not a bad thing (as long as it's not followed by another such week).

MattRogish 14y ago
That's a good point. I believe the research (and my experience) suggests overwork can provide benefit in the short run (2-3 weeks) but much after that and you get diminishing and then negative marginal returns - followed by a "time off" recovery period. Strategically used, overwork can provide benefit but it sounds like Starcraft was a year-long overwork, which is a disaster. Many of the "Founders at Work" stories glorify overwork and make it sound like it was part of the norm of the culture, so it seems like it was much longer than a few weeks. Which is why I'm confused - either long-running overwork caused these companies to succeed, or it was not bad enough to cause them to fail?