4 ms·

Most of these articles that deride long work hours don't account for the following: 1. When you are the smartest in the room, you can get away with 40 hours be

by SubuSS 13y ago

Most of these articles that deride long work hours don't account for the following: 1. When you are the smartest in the room, you can get away with 40 hours because what you produce in 40 hours will be orders of magnitude ahead of what a normal guy produces in 80 hours. Trouble comes when you start being part of super smart teams (mine has about 9 engineers sharing around 150 years of systems/db building expertise amongst them). Here 40 hours gets you only to the 'achieved level'. For some people this is not good enough, especially if they come from a continuous string of 'excelled levels'. 2. I am not paid to do 40 hours of work. I am paid to get things done. Some things are automatable (which we do) but a lot of things require NLP and is hard to automate. These we do manually. They add up. 3. It is VERY hard to hire good senior engineers. My company (Amazon) pays a ton of money, has offices in great cities but still we find hiring hard. This means you won't be offloading a bunch of those anytime soon and to be competitive, you have to do this. 4. Many of us do this not out of coercion, but because we want to. I personally have a set of goals, own a bunch of stuff that I really want to get done. 8 hours is not enough. 5. As you grow senior, you spend a ton of time co-ordinating work. This means unless you dedicate time before and after regular office hours, you personally aren't going to get coding done. And somethings require your personal coding/debugging effort - no way around it. Family setup is personal: At least in my case, thankfully my wife chose to be a home maker and a full time mom. This frees up a lot of my responsibilities and allows me to focus harder on my job for the betterment of the family as a unit. YMMV. EDIT: I always plug my team, so will do it again here. We are hiring. If you want to work with world class engineers in a great & growing service (AWS DynamoDB) - PM me. I chose this for the learning and no regrets till date.

keithpeter 13y ago
" It is VERY hard to hire good senior engineers. My company (Amazon) pays a ton of money, has offices in great cities but still we find hiring hard." Why? Can you positively exclude the influence of the known long-hour culture?
- SubuSS 13y ago
  >Why? 1. Because we are in a super competitive market. The talent pool at the top end is VERY contested and for every offer from one of FB/GOOG/AMZN/TWTR/MS there is a competing bigger offer elsewhere. 2. The top end doesn't usually move for things like money/perks. They feel ownership to the thing they are building meaning they move only when they are super pissed or are at a logical endpoint. They might also have familial ties to their locale by now. 3. Also even if you move as a super senior engineer, you will have to go through the age old cycle of convincing EVERYONE in the new company that you are worth your salt etc. else you won't garner much respect. This is way harder in these smarter teams. That's off the top of my head. >Can you positively exclude the influence of the known long-hour culture? I think so. Most of the high-achievers seem to not care about this. These are people who ride on the high of solving complex issues and they need the repeated hits.
  - polskibus 13y ago
    Feel ownership ? Do you mean that you receive shares immediately when you join?
    - SubuSS 13y ago
      :) I meant ownership in terms of features / products. The money becomes a non-issue after a point. To answer your specific question: Yes. You do receive shares / sign-on bonuses and these amount to be very big. But they usually have a vesting period though.
      - deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]
  - Retric 13y ago
    Google for example would still be profitable it paid everyone including secritary's 500,000$ a year. So no companies stick with a market rate well below what a top engineer's output is actually worth.
- Roboprog 13y ago
  I have only a very small data set: myself. Amazon tried to recruit me (I have almost 30 years experience, much of it as team lead). However, when I found out about the corporate "death march" culture, I decided not to pursue it. My annual salary would go up, but my hourly compensation would go down. It might not matter to your wife and kids, but it matters to mine. Otherwise, the work there did in fact sound pretty interesting, but the opportunity cost was too high.
  - SubuSS 13y ago
    Different strokes for different people I guess :). I respect your choice.
kulkarnic 13y ago
This is bunk. You're paid to do work which can be done in 40 hours/wk or you're being exploited (and so are a lot of other people). When you're 60 would you rather have memories with your kids, or have the satisfaction of writing lots of code in the 2010s that is not being used anymore because it got obsolete/automated? (don't believe that can happen? Talk to rule-based AI researchers from the 80s) The only reasons to do long hours are because a) you need a temporary career boost, and b) you're Batman and the world depends on you.
- SubuSS 13y ago
  Just because there is a possibility that my work could be made obsolete, I can't stop working. That is a non-starter. Why do you think people keep working on various fields like physics when most of them are theories that might be disproved very soon? You are also forgetting the reason where you want to address the engineering need in you: Some of us have fun making this. Believe it or not, We want to do this :) I do have other time that I spend with my family etc. More or less is personal preference. Family is one of those things that one can sink in infinite time and still feel incomplete - we all strike balances. FWIW - I sleep only 6 hours or so, so it provides a bit of a leg up. I usually nap a bit on the weekends though. My meta-point is: Some people look at a job as a means to make a living. I look at mine as an opportunity. Here I have a company that is willing to put millions of dollars in the direction I point at or into the work that I am doing, based purely on trust. This kind of scale / experience is impossible to get by myself. For this I have to go the extra mile. The end result might benefit the company, but I find joy in the process of creation. The company is not exactly chintzy either. They compensate me well enough to keep that from becoming an issue to me or my family.
- gordaco 13y ago
  I would add that a lot of employers (and I suppose that also VCs, but I haven't had the experience first hand) love to try to make you think you're Batman, in order to trick you into long hours.
  - SubuSS 13y ago
    How often does that work? Doesn't it become obvious that you aren't one after the first deathmarch?
avenger123 13y ago
Shouldn't point 1 be the inverse? If you are working with a group of people that are considered "super smart", and you are in that group, well, regardless of what you say, the inclusion in the group makes you also "super smart". So, in fact you should be working even less than 40 hours and get much much more done than the "average" group. It almost seems like Amazon culture foster's this attitude of "we hire really smart people, if you can't keep up, you need to work harder." This might make sense if one or two people in the group were doing the long hours but when its the whole group, well, I would suggest that the company has done a great job of selling the kool-aid.
- SubuSS 13y ago
  Amazon doesn't foist a 'keep up' requirement on people. You can just do your job, make a bunch of money and have fun working here for a long time. There might be a little bit more work compared to other companies that build packaged software, but nothing the web companies don't have. And no - I was not saying the team does long hours either. We have all mixes of people, some do long hours and some wrap it at 40 or 45 max. I was only justifying why some might do long hours. Any super-smart group with good camaraderie gets a bunch of work done. But if you want to distinguish yourself in that group, you are going to have to put in extra. There is also the pesky part about differing experiences / knowledge bases. It takes extra to tap into all that as well. All of that add up.
  - avenger123 13y ago
    Thanks for the update. It helps remove some assumptions.
memracom 13y ago
The OP does mention that long hours are not sustainable which recognizes that occasional bursts of extra effort will get results. As for point number 5, nobody said that people should go home and sleep at the end of their 8 hour day. If you have a hobby that is completely different from your day job, then it will energize you, as you have discovered. Your day job is management and your hobby is coding.
- SubuSS 13y ago
  Most of my hobbies are related to my product - so no issues there. But even in the main project, there are some issues that require the personal attention of senior engineers. These will require time aside from the regular co-ordination / mentoring. Also I don't manage people. Just projects - a Technical lead so to say.

by SubuSS 13y ago

keithpeter 13y ago

" It is VERY hard to hire good senior engineers. My company (Amazon) pays a ton of money, has offices in great cities but still we find hiring hard." Why? Can you positively exclude the influence of the known long-hour culture?

SubuSS 13y ago
>Why? 1. Because we are in a super competitive market. The talent pool at the top end is VERY contested and for every offer from one of FB/GOOG/AMZN/TWTR/MS there is a competing bigger offer elsewhere. 2. The top end doesn't usually move for things like money/perks. They feel ownership to the thing they are building meaning they move only when they are super pissed or are at a logical endpoint. They might also have familial ties to their locale by now. 3. Also even if you move as a super senior engineer, you will have to go through the age old cycle of convincing EVERYONE in the new company that you are worth your salt etc. else you won't garner much respect. This is way harder in these smarter teams. That's off the top of my head. >Can you positively exclude the influence of the known long-hour culture? I think so. Most of the high-achievers seem to not care about this. These are people who ride on the high of solving complex issues and they need the repeated hits.
- polskibus 13y ago
  Feel ownership ? Do you mean that you receive shares immediately when you join?
  - SubuSS 13y ago
    :) I meant ownership in terms of features / products. The money becomes a non-issue after a point. To answer your specific question: Yes. You do receive shares / sign-on bonuses and these amount to be very big. But they usually have a vesting period though.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
- Retric 13y ago
  Google for example would still be profitable it paid everyone including secritary's 500,000$ a year. So no companies stick with a market rate well below what a top engineer's output is actually worth.
Roboprog 13y ago
I have only a very small data set: myself. Amazon tried to recruit me (I have almost 30 years experience, much of it as team lead). However, when I found out about the corporate "death march" culture, I decided not to pursue it. My annual salary would go up, but my hourly compensation would go down. It might not matter to your wife and kids, but it matters to mine. Otherwise, the work there did in fact sound pretty interesting, but the opportunity cost was too high.
- SubuSS 13y ago
  Different strokes for different people I guess :). I respect your choice.

kulkarnic 13y ago

This is bunk. You're paid to do work which can be done in 40 hours/wk or you're being exploited (and so are a lot of other people). When you're 60 would you rather have memories with your kids, or have the satisfaction of writing lots of code in the 2010s that is not being used anymore because it got obsolete/automated? (don't believe that can happen? Talk to rule-based AI researchers from the 80s) The only reasons to do long hours are because a) you need a temporary career boost, and b) you're Batman and the world depends on you.

SubuSS 13y ago
Just because there is a possibility that my work could be made obsolete, I can't stop working. That is a non-starter. Why do you think people keep working on various fields like physics when most of them are theories that might be disproved very soon? You are also forgetting the reason where you want to address the engineering need in you: Some of us have fun making this. Believe it or not, We want to do this :) I do have other time that I spend with my family etc. More or less is personal preference. Family is one of those things that one can sink in infinite time and still feel incomplete - we all strike balances. FWIW - I sleep only 6 hours or so, so it provides a bit of a leg up. I usually nap a bit on the weekends though. My meta-point is: Some people look at a job as a means to make a living. I look at mine as an opportunity. Here I have a company that is willing to put millions of dollars in the direction I point at or into the work that I am doing, based purely on trust. This kind of scale / experience is impossible to get by myself. For this I have to go the extra mile. The end result might benefit the company, but I find joy in the process of creation. The company is not exactly chintzy either. They compensate me well enough to keep that from becoming an issue to me or my family.
gordaco 13y ago
I would add that a lot of employers (and I suppose that also VCs, but I haven't had the experience first hand) love to try to make you think you're Batman, in order to trick you into long hours.
- SubuSS 13y ago
  How often does that work? Doesn't it become obvious that you aren't one after the first deathmarch?

avenger123 13y ago

Shouldn't point 1 be the inverse? If you are working with a group of people that are considered "super smart", and you are in that group, well, regardless of what you say, the inclusion in the group makes you also "super smart". So, in fact you should be working even less than 40 hours and get much much more done than the "average" group. It almost seems like Amazon culture foster's this attitude of "we hire really smart people, if you can't keep up, you need to work harder." This might make sense if one or two people in the group were doing the long hours but when its the whole group, well, I would suggest that the company has done a great job of selling the kool-aid.

SubuSS 13y ago
Amazon doesn't foist a 'keep up' requirement on people. You can just do your job, make a bunch of money and have fun working here for a long time. There might be a little bit more work compared to other companies that build packaged software, but nothing the web companies don't have. And no - I was not saying the team does long hours either. We have all mixes of people, some do long hours and some wrap it at 40 or 45 max. I was only justifying why some might do long hours. Any super-smart group with good camaraderie gets a bunch of work done. But if you want to distinguish yourself in that group, you are going to have to put in extra. There is also the pesky part about differing experiences / knowledge bases. It takes extra to tap into all that as well. All of that add up.
- avenger123 13y ago
  Thanks for the update. It helps remove some assumptions.

memracom 13y ago

The OP does mention that long hours are not sustainable which recognizes that occasional bursts of extra effort will get results. As for point number 5, nobody said that people should go home and sleep at the end of their 8 hour day. If you have a hobby that is completely different from your day job, then it will energize you, as you have discovered. Your day job is management and your hobby is coding.

SubuSS 13y ago
Most of my hobbies are related to my product - so no issues there. But even in the main project, there are some issues that require the personal attention of senior engineers. These will require time aside from the regular co-ordination / mentoring. Also I don't manage people. Just projects - a Technical lead so to say.