4 ms·
This is not the reality of what is required to do great things [1]. This is one path, but there are many others. There are lots of people who work 40-50 hours
by birken 12y ago
This is not the reality of what is required to do great things [1]. This is one path, but there are many others. There are lots of people who work 40-50 hours a week and have incredibly successful startups/companies/whatever. There are people who work 80 hours a week and their startup is a complete piece of garbage.
Jamie Zawinski has a great great blog post about this [2], which I'll quote part of:
> He's trying to make the point that the only path to success in the software industry is to work insane hours, sleep under your desk, and give up your one and only youth, and if you don't do that, you're a pussy. He's using my words to try and back up that thesis. I hate this, because it's not true, and it's disingenuous.
I'm not saying the OP is trying to sell this lie too. He is posting about how he is tired and wants to go home and relax. However, the life he describes is very much in the vein of Jamie's blog post. This lifestyle is not required to succeed, and it may in fact be quite counter-productive (as this blog post is attesting to). If your life isn't like this and you aren't working this hard it really isn't saying anything about how likely to succeed you are.
1: Though I don't know exactly what "great things" is... Making a lot of money? Going to Mars? Getting on the cover of Forbes magazine? Some of these require more effort than others.
2: http://www.jwz.org/blog/2011/11/watch-a-vc-use-my-name-to-sell-a-con/ http://www.jwz.org/blog/2011/11/watch-a-vc-use-my-name-to-se...
- hudibras 12y agoThanks, I hadn't read that jwz post before. This is another killer quote: >But the people who made 100x as much as the engineers did? I can tell you for a fact that none of them slept under their desk.
- eitally 12y agoThey didn't sleep under their desk, but they may well have spend 80% of their nights in hotels, which is worse (imho).
- scott_karana 12y agoDepends on the company, and whether the execs were staying (and golfing) at a five-star...
- eitally 12y agoAbsolutely, and also on the definition of executive. A lot level VP -- one of potentially thousands in the org -- at a mega corp is not living remotely the same life as a corporate officer.
- coffeemug 12y ago> There are lots of people who work 40-50 hours a week and have incredibly successful startups/companies/whatever. There are people who work 80 hours a week and their startup is a complete piece of garbage. There are lots of people who work 80 hours a week and their startup is garbage. But there are very few (if any at all) people who got their startup off the ground with 50 hours of work per week. Working long hours is necessary but not sufficient. (There are lots of people who claim it isn't necessary, but none of them actually had a successful startup)
- birken 12y agoI worked at a very successful startup, including getting it off the ground, and rarely worked more than 50 hours per week. I don't know how common my experience was, but I can assure you it isn't necessary.