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So what I'm reading here is why CEOs shouldn't go to the office on weekends and check their mail at dinner. What's glaringly absent from the second part of thi

So what I'm reading here is why CEOs shouldn't go to the office on weekends and check their mail at dinner. What's glaringly absent from the second part of this article is not asking the engineers to come in on weekends, either. Those guys have families and their negligible equity certainly doesn't justify 80-hour weeks. It sounds to me like the author would rather have gone home on weekends while the engineers stayed at the office.

altero 13y ago
I had similar impression.
seivan 13y ago
Got the same impression.
crusso 13y ago
I just had the impression that he wished he could have had his cake and eaten it too. He made the familial sacrifices. He had the business success. Now looking back he wished that he would have magically had that success without putting in all the time. Does not compute.
- sriramk 13y ago
  I suspect he thinks he should have figured out a way to do both and not make it into an explicit trade-off. In fact, I think the entire post is about how "having+eating the cake" is possible if you put some effort into it.
  - crusso 13y ago
    if you put some effort into it That's circular, though. How could he put yet more effort into something besides his business success when he said that he was pouring everything he had into it? I would have respected his viewpoint a lot more if he had just said, "I didn't need to make all that money. My family should have been more important and I should have chosen them over the next shipping date at least 6 out of 10 times. If it had meant missing delivery dates and loss of some contracts, then so be it."
    - TeMPOraL 13y ago
      > How could he put yet more effort into something besides his business success when he said that he was pouring everything he had into it? By redirecting some efforts into optimizing the way he handles his business and family, thus making them require less effort for the same level of effect.
    - potatolicious 13y ago
      Work smart, not just hard. The question is whether or not it would have been possible - and whether or not the compromises he made on his family life actually made the difference between failure and success. In other words, those emails answered by sneaking off to the bathroom, did they matter in the success of the company, or could they have waited until morning? Would leaving the office an hour early twice a week have resulted in missing delivery dates and loss of contracts? If they did, were those deliveries and contracts critical to the exit? Did dragging everyone into work on a weekend actually help the company, or was all that hard work (on his part and his employees') actually slowing down their engineering? None of that is obvious. I dislike the Silicon Valley meme that family and money are mutually exclusive, or that one must necessarily go on suicidal work-rampages for months/years on end to achieve financial success. There is a world of difference between what looks critical and what is critical. I also dislike the notion that a bunch of sleep-deprived, high-strung people who don't have their shit together, staying alive by a combination of greed, caffeine, and blood pressure, is what "working optimally" looks like. It's clearly not. This whole blog post is basically a post mortem where the author wonders if all those things that he thought had to be done right then, right there, actually had to be, or whether there was more wiggle room than he thought at the time.
  - WalterSear 13y ago
    He wasn't able to do it as a founder - he changed jobs and found more time for his family.
yulaow 13y ago
Each time I read madness as 60h/w, 70h/w or the wtf 80h/w I am really happy to live and work on EU. I think I would fall in depression really fast if I had to sacrifice (because over a certain limit, to me, it is only sacrifice) so much of my time and passion. Also in my opinion, ever over a certain limit (For me is 50h/w), the productivity of an engineer just vanish. I prefer work to live against live to work.
- afterburner 13y ago
  And just think, Americans (and Canadians) also get much less vacation time than Europeans! Geniuses!
  - foobarian 13y ago
    I guess the European peons did learn some lessons from all the centuries of oppression under the feudal nobility. The Americans never had that experience, so they bought into the company line hook line and sinker.
    - mhurron 13y ago
      If you're going to attribute history to why the workforce in Europe is the way it is, then the American expectation of the peons to work all the time is because the US never got over having slave labour. BTW that line of thinking is ridiculous. Europeans and Americans learned about feudalism the same way, from history books. No one who was around when labour laws were going into effect has first, second or third hand knowledge of feudalism, slavery or working conditions during the Industrial Revolution.
      - kourt 13y ago
        In addition to slavery, Americans also had The Frontier. A man who didn't like the wages offered had the option to go make a homestead.
      - lil_cain 13y ago
        European culture is likely to have been far more shaped by feudalism than American culture is. You don't have to individually remember something for it to have an important effect on your values and actions.
wpietri 13y ago
Yeah, that was the same reaction I had. I also long ago stopped believing that 80-hour engineering weeks are much more productive than 40-hour weeks. For one week? Sure. Two? Maybe. Months? Nope! Definitely not better, probably worse. (Why is a long answer, but for one take, this is good: http://www.lostgarden.com/2008/09/rules-of-productivity-presentation.html http://www.lostgarden.com/2008/09/rules-of-productivity-pres... But even if none of that human-factors stuff were true, I'd still believe that because the cost of error. A tired programmer can easily be negatively productive, because small errors tonight turn into land-mine bugs that later blow up hours or days of time. 80-hour weeks value apparent productivity over actual productivity.) All of those people should have gone home. Sense of urgency + stupid behavior + big payout is not actually proof that the stupid behavior led to the big payout. For every success like his, I can find a dozen stories of death marches that led to absolutely nothing worthwhile.
- eps 13y ago
  80-hour work week for months is the only option if you are working on your ideas in parallel with stable, paying job. Then you quit and the project is just barely getting off the ground. You worked 80h/wk so far, so you have this chance to double your productivity. In fact, that's exactly why you quit, so it's damn sure that you keep working the 80h schedule. And then it becomes progressively hard to go back to the normal working hours, because it implies slacking. So it's not a matter of believing in 80-hour engineering weeks and it's not a matter of choice for many people. It's just how things naturally develop when you are starting on your own.
  - wpietri 13y ago
    If what naturally develops is not as effective as something else, I would like to think that people would eventually stop doing it. As I mentioned (and as the links demonstrate) 80 hour work weeks don't double productivity in the long term. They may double the perception of productivity, and they may satisfy one's sense of urgency by never giving time to think, but I have never seen any evidence that they double productivity in the creation of software.
001sky 13y ago
What's glaringly absent from the second part of this article is not asking the engineers to come in on weekends, either. Exactly. The culture should be 'everybody else' works 80 hours a week and dealts with a nasty commute? But the CEO, lives a couple blocks away and blocks out time here and there to play with his kids...? Ok, There is certainly nothing wrong with this advice for CEOs, but the question goes begging as to wether or not such a "game theoretic" outcome is stable if the strategy is pursued by a broader set of employees. One clue, of course, is in the original story...where work/life balance is a "value" to the company...and the c-level execs are all washing their cars and feeding them pizza...while the engineering team they slave away...on the weekends in the cubicle farm...missing kids ball-games and family meals...etc. WTF. That's one heck of an 'omission' from the problems that face the CEO. And in one sense it is also incredibly narcissistic (literal sense), to be "fixing" your own problems but not those of your team at work. It's so bizzarre I'm not sure I didn't mis-understand something? It seems a glaring error in the essay not to reconcile this part of the plotline. I do give him credit for having at least woven part of it into the story, however.
- ececconi 13y ago
  Got the same impression.
  - vasilipupkin 13y ago
    I believe you guys misunderstood him. I think he is not saying he should not have done those 100 plus hour weeks as a CEO necessarily, but that he was simultaneously being a dick to his wife and eventually this probably had some negative impact on his CEO performance, not just on his personal life. What I got out of this is his advice is, try to the extent possible to be present for your family and get rid of "I am a CEO, bitch" attitude when you get home because your wife/husband may not appreciate it very much
    - blazespin 13y ago
      No, they got it right. The #1 advice he should have given his former self was to ensure that the company DNA had proper work life/balance at its core. Once that culture was in place, the other things would have pretty much taken care of themselves.
georgemcbay 13y ago
Yeah, after the first part of the article I spent the entire last bit vaguely hoping to see the remorse of having implicitly forced the developers and other executives to make the same decision he made, considering that were I in his shoes I'd feel terrible about how I treated my own family life but even worse about what impact it may (even potentially) have had on other people's families since they had less explicit choice in the matter. Didn't find it. I guess I'd make a horrible modern CEO, I lack the unflinching confidence to be so self-absorbed.
jusben1369 13y ago
I'm only going to reply to this because so many of you got this impression. My take was "very early on you have to do these incredibly long development hours to ship a product, hit a milestone, and raise" The engineer's were looking at a rough 3 - 6 months of weekends etc. The CEO was looking at a rough 7 years. I'm not advocating that the engineers needed to even do that rough 3 -6 months just highlighting why I think he doesn't show remorse vs talk about the pain of CEO's.
- mcphilip 13y ago
  Maybe I'm just unlucky but I've never worked at a startup where pressure relents on engineering after the initial push. I feel on call 24/7 now that we're in production with paying customers.
  - jusben1369 13y ago
    As I said I'm not endosring it. Just explaining what seemed like a gap for so many readers.
  - Bahamut 13y ago
    I think you're just unlucky - if my CEO sees me working at 8 pm or later, he tells me to go home, even if we're in a big push. He wants me ready to do more quality work the day after, and not burn out.
codereflection 13y ago
Did everyone here miss the part about the importance of work/life balance at IronPort and how HE wasn't living it? Every company has deadlines to meet, and sometimes you have to work extra time. This guy, however, was working ALL the time, not just during those crunch periods.
rphlx 13y ago
Indeed: the writer comes off as a major narcissist, with a minor in status display ("Harvard MBA/VP Wife"). I suppose a near-total lack of empathy for your fellow man is, if not defendable, at least an understandable trait for a CEO working an engineering team to death, and then moaning about how "generously" buying them dinner every Sunday night was impacting his family life, until he could cash out based on their efforts.
- sabbatic13 13y ago
  In my experience, some narcissism is a requirement to be a startup CEO. And I don't mean that in a smart-ass way. The incessant representation of the company seems to require a strong identification of one's self with the company. It's sort of an enabling trait which has some potential negatives consequences. Among the latter would the perspective that sees everyone around them in the company as an extension of their will. Getting to the point of being a "real" CEO also usually requires some more-than-usual self-involvement and identification of one's endeavor with one's self. Good CEOs (by my standards) just have a touch of this. Many have too much. As you indicate, there's a certain logic to it.
marcamillion 13y ago
I think you are reading into it too much. Everybody can only speak from their own experience. I don't know Scott and never worked in his startup, but I suspect that what he may be angling at is the fact that as CEO he sets the tone of the company. I can't speak for him, but I suspect that if he felt like he needed to enforce more work-life balance for himself, he would perhaps do the same for his employees....given that he sets the tone for the organization.
- thrownaway2424 13y ago
  Sure, but in reality they did work 7-day weeks and he did get a massive payoff. To express the theoretical desire to have better work/life balance is meaningless without a sincere expression of which part of his fortune he'd trade for it.
  - vasilipupkin 13y ago
    Yeah, I don't think it's necessary to trade anything. I think he is saying, he could have for example, attended more school events AND still had the massive exit. Or, say, after getting home, do the dishes etc. to at least show his wife that he was trying to help. None of that is somehow inconsistent with having a big exit
dsuth 13y ago
Last line of the post: > I also believe this change is actually a much better example of leadership than the one I was exuding. When a leader shows the way toward getting things done and balancing their life, it sets a much better example for everyone else in the company who struggle with it too. He says it right there.

altero 13y ago

I had similar impression.

seivan 13y ago

Got the same impression.

crusso 13y ago

I just had the impression that he wished he could have had his cake and eaten it too. He made the familial sacrifices. He had the business success. Now looking back he wished that he would have magically had that success without putting in all the time. Does not compute.

sriramk 13y ago
I suspect he thinks he should have figured out a way to do both and not make it into an explicit trade-off. In fact, I think the entire post is about how "having+eating the cake" is possible if you put some effort into it.
- crusso 13y ago
  if you put some effort into it That's circular, though. How could he put yet more effort into something besides his business success when he said that he was pouring everything he had into it? I would have respected his viewpoint a lot more if he had just said, "I didn't need to make all that money. My family should have been more important and I should have chosen them over the next shipping date at least 6 out of 10 times. If it had meant missing delivery dates and loss of some contracts, then so be it."
  - TeMPOraL 13y ago
    > How could he put yet more effort into something besides his business success when he said that he was pouring everything he had into it? By redirecting some efforts into optimizing the way he handles his business and family, thus making them require less effort for the same level of effect.
  - potatolicious 13y ago
    Work smart, not just hard. The question is whether or not it would have been possible - and whether or not the compromises he made on his family life actually made the difference between failure and success. In other words, those emails answered by sneaking off to the bathroom, did they matter in the success of the company, or could they have waited until morning? Would leaving the office an hour early twice a week have resulted in missing delivery dates and loss of contracts? If they did, were those deliveries and contracts critical to the exit? Did dragging everyone into work on a weekend actually help the company, or was all that hard work (on his part and his employees') actually slowing down their engineering? None of that is obvious. I dislike the Silicon Valley meme that family and money are mutually exclusive, or that one must necessarily go on suicidal work-rampages for months/years on end to achieve financial success. There is a world of difference between what looks critical and what is critical. I also dislike the notion that a bunch of sleep-deprived, high-strung people who don't have their shit together, staying alive by a combination of greed, caffeine, and blood pressure, is what "working optimally" looks like. It's clearly not. This whole blog post is basically a post mortem where the author wonders if all those things that he thought had to be done right then, right there, actually had to be, or whether there was more wiggle room than he thought at the time.
- WalterSear 13y ago
  He wasn't able to do it as a founder - he changed jobs and found more time for his family.

yulaow 13y ago

Each time I read madness as 60h/w, 70h/w or the wtf 80h/w I am really happy to live and work on EU. I think I would fall in depression really fast if I had to sacrifice (because over a certain limit, to me, it is only sacrifice) so much of my time and passion. Also in my opinion, ever over a certain limit (For me is 50h/w), the productivity of an engineer just vanish. I prefer work to live against live to work.

afterburner 13y ago
And just think, Americans (and Canadians) also get much less vacation time than Europeans! Geniuses!
- foobarian 13y ago
  I guess the European peons did learn some lessons from all the centuries of oppression under the feudal nobility. The Americans never had that experience, so they bought into the company line hook line and sinker.
  - mhurron 13y ago
    If you're going to attribute history to why the workforce in Europe is the way it is, then the American expectation of the peons to work all the time is because the US never got over having slave labour. BTW that line of thinking is ridiculous. Europeans and Americans learned about feudalism the same way, from history books. No one who was around when labour laws were going into effect has first, second or third hand knowledge of feudalism, slavery or working conditions during the Industrial Revolution.
    - kourt 13y ago
      In addition to slavery, Americans also had The Frontier. A man who didn't like the wages offered had the option to go make a homestead.
    - lil_cain 13y ago
      European culture is likely to have been far more shaped by feudalism than American culture is. You don't have to individually remember something for it to have an important effect on your values and actions.

wpietri 13y ago

Yeah, that was the same reaction I had. I also long ago stopped believing that 80-hour engineering weeks are much more productive than 40-hour weeks. For one week? Sure. Two? Maybe. Months? Nope! Definitely not better, probably worse. (Why is a long answer, but for one take, this is good: http://www.lostgarden.com/2008/09/rules-of-productivity-presentation.html http://www.lostgarden.com/2008/09/rules-of-productivity-pres... But even if none of that human-factors stuff were true, I'd still believe that because the cost of error. A tired programmer can easily be negatively productive, because small errors tonight turn into land-mine bugs that later blow up hours or days of time. 80-hour weeks value apparent productivity over actual productivity.) All of those people should have gone home. Sense of urgency + stupid behavior + big payout is not actually proof that the stupid behavior led to the big payout. For every success like his, I can find a dozen stories of death marches that led to absolutely nothing worthwhile.

eps 13y ago
80-hour work week for months is the only option if you are working on your ideas in parallel with stable, paying job. Then you quit and the project is just barely getting off the ground. You worked 80h/wk so far, so you have this chance to double your productivity. In fact, that's exactly why you quit, so it's damn sure that you keep working the 80h schedule. And then it becomes progressively hard to go back to the normal working hours, because it implies slacking. So it's not a matter of believing in 80-hour engineering weeks and it's not a matter of choice for many people. It's just how things naturally develop when you are starting on your own.
- wpietri 13y ago
  If what naturally develops is not as effective as something else, I would like to think that people would eventually stop doing it. As I mentioned (and as the links demonstrate) 80 hour work weeks don't double productivity in the long term. They may double the perception of productivity, and they may satisfy one's sense of urgency by never giving time to think, but I have never seen any evidence that they double productivity in the creation of software.

001sky 13y ago

What's glaringly absent from the second part of this article is not asking the engineers to come in on weekends, either. Exactly. The culture should be 'everybody else' works 80 hours a week and dealts with a nasty commute? But the CEO, lives a couple blocks away and blocks out time here and there to play with his kids...? Ok, There is certainly nothing wrong with this advice for CEOs, but the question goes begging as to wether or not such a "game theoretic" outcome is stable if the strategy is pursued by a broader set of employees. One clue, of course, is in the original story...where work/life balance is a "value" to the company...and the c-level execs are all washing their cars and feeding them pizza...while the engineering team they slave away...on the weekends in the cubicle farm...missing kids ball-games and family meals...etc. WTF. That's one heck of an 'omission' from the problems that face the CEO. And in one sense it is also incredibly narcissistic (literal sense), to be "fixing" your own problems but not those of your team at work. It's so bizzarre I'm not sure I didn't mis-understand something? It seems a glaring error in the essay not to reconcile this part of the plotline. I do give him credit for having at least woven part of it into the story, however.

ececconi 13y ago
Got the same impression.
- vasilipupkin 13y ago
  I believe you guys misunderstood him. I think he is not saying he should not have done those 100 plus hour weeks as a CEO necessarily, but that he was simultaneously being a dick to his wife and eventually this probably had some negative impact on his CEO performance, not just on his personal life. What I got out of this is his advice is, try to the extent possible to be present for your family and get rid of "I am a CEO, bitch" attitude when you get home because your wife/husband may not appreciate it very much
  - blazespin 13y ago
    No, they got it right. The #1 advice he should have given his former self was to ensure that the company DNA had proper work life/balance at its core. Once that culture was in place, the other things would have pretty much taken care of themselves.

georgemcbay 13y ago

Yeah, after the first part of the article I spent the entire last bit vaguely hoping to see the remorse of having implicitly forced the developers and other executives to make the same decision he made, considering that were I in his shoes I'd feel terrible about how I treated my own family life but even worse about what impact it may (even potentially) have had on other people's families since they had less explicit choice in the matter. Didn't find it. I guess I'd make a horrible modern CEO, I lack the unflinching confidence to be so self-absorbed.

jusben1369 13y ago

I'm only going to reply to this because so many of you got this impression. My take was "very early on you have to do these incredibly long development hours to ship a product, hit a milestone, and raise" The engineer's were looking at a rough 3 - 6 months of weekends etc. The CEO was looking at a rough 7 years. I'm not advocating that the engineers needed to even do that rough 3 -6 months just highlighting why I think he doesn't show remorse vs talk about the pain of CEO's.

mcphilip 13y ago
Maybe I'm just unlucky but I've never worked at a startup where pressure relents on engineering after the initial push. I feel on call 24/7 now that we're in production with paying customers.
- jusben1369 13y ago
  As I said I'm not endosring it. Just explaining what seemed like a gap for so many readers.
- Bahamut 13y ago
  I think you're just unlucky - if my CEO sees me working at 8 pm or later, he tells me to go home, even if we're in a big push. He wants me ready to do more quality work the day after, and not burn out.

codereflection 13y ago

Did everyone here miss the part about the importance of work/life balance at IronPort and how HE wasn't living it? Every company has deadlines to meet, and sometimes you have to work extra time. This guy, however, was working ALL the time, not just during those crunch periods.

rphlx 13y ago

Indeed: the writer comes off as a major narcissist, with a minor in status display ("Harvard MBA/VP Wife"). I suppose a near-total lack of empathy for your fellow man is, if not defendable, at least an understandable trait for a CEO working an engineering team to death, and then moaning about how "generously" buying them dinner every Sunday night was impacting his family life, until he could cash out based on their efforts.

sabbatic13 13y ago
In my experience, some narcissism is a requirement to be a startup CEO. And I don't mean that in a smart-ass way. The incessant representation of the company seems to require a strong identification of one's self with the company. It's sort of an enabling trait which has some potential negatives consequences. Among the latter would the perspective that sees everyone around them in the company as an extension of their will. Getting to the point of being a "real" CEO also usually requires some more-than-usual self-involvement and identification of one's endeavor with one's self. Good CEOs (by my standards) just have a touch of this. Many have too much. As you indicate, there's a certain logic to it.

marcamillion 13y ago

I think you are reading into it too much. Everybody can only speak from their own experience. I don't know Scott and never worked in his startup, but I suspect that what he may be angling at is the fact that as CEO he sets the tone of the company. I can't speak for him, but I suspect that if he felt like he needed to enforce more work-life balance for himself, he would perhaps do the same for his employees....given that he sets the tone for the organization.

thrownaway2424 13y ago
Sure, but in reality they did work 7-day weeks and he did get a massive payoff. To express the theoretical desire to have better work/life balance is meaningless without a sincere expression of which part of his fortune he'd trade for it.
- vasilipupkin 13y ago
  Yeah, I don't think it's necessary to trade anything. I think he is saying, he could have for example, attended more school events AND still had the massive exit. Or, say, after getting home, do the dishes etc. to at least show his wife that he was trying to help. None of that is somehow inconsistent with having a big exit

dsuth 13y ago

Last line of the post: > I also believe this change is actually a much better example of leadership than the one I was exuding. When a leader shows the way toward getting things done and balancing their life, it sets a much better example for everyone else in the company who struggle with it too. He says it right there.