Sleep deprivation is not a badge of honor

someone tell this to david blaine

It depends on the kind of work. I think there's a distinction between creative work and the more mundane stuff, and any role worth doing has both aspects. I think people only have a few hours of high quality creative work in them a day. But the reality is that most important work has a much larger drudgery component and working longer hours for that most definitely does scale linearly. Fixing bugs or pouring through financial data for inconsistencies is probably going to take you X number of hours no matter how many days you spread it over. In fact, you're probably going to be more efficient doing it in some marathon sessions.

>This might be better titled "Chronic sleep deprivation is not a badge of honor"

The original title is better. It makes perfect sense. It expresses the same meaning. He is clearly referring to the phenomenon of sleep deprivation and not to a single instance. It's clear from the title, and the article even explicitly points this out.

He isn't writing legalese. He doesn't have to gird every sentence against being taken out of context and nitpicked. To do so would be bad English (as your example demonstrates).

I know we live in a fast food, sound bite time. I know we expect headlines to be clear and to the point. His is. And it uses better language.

The last thirty years have placed a tremendous strain on the language. We have lots more to talk about and not many more words to do it with. The solution isn't to pile on more and more qualifiers. You can never attain absolute precision. The solution is to realize that as the number of things we have to talk about increases, the expressiveness of the language expands to account for them.

You can't fit everything into a sound bite. If it's worth talking about, it's worth explaining at length. And if it's worth explaining at length, you might as well use good English.

Not everyone in a startup has to work hard, so long as some people do. But someone had to be carrying a pager when the servers went down, or eBay wouldn't still exist.

In investment banking, you usually work on a small team of 3-6 people. The work day is very different depending on whether your team is currently working on a deal or is between deals and pitching clients.

If your team is on a deal, then there could be honest-to-goodness work keeping your team busy for 100 hours a week. Tasks include preparing the materials used to market your client to potential investors (including financial models, presentations, and dense official offering documents), managing and attending meetings with investors or the Board, running down data requests, and diverse other things.

Most of the bullshit work comes in when a team is between deals. During this period, the senior members spend a lot of time working their connections at potential clients while the junior members prepare "pitches" - presentations designed to convince a company to do a deal. Junior employees are expected to be at the office when their superiors arrive and stay at the office when their superiors leave. When I was working, I might start a typical day by finishing up a request from the day before, then have absolutely nothing to do for 4 or 5 hours, and then receive and turn around assignments from sometime in the afternoon until the evening. The boss would make his last calls around 7PM, which is when I would get my last batch of work for the day. I would work on that for anywhere between one to thirteen hours and then head home (or not, if it was 13 hours).

The culture at an investment bank is very unforgiving. An employee must be a competent worker to survive, but he must also be sure to keep up appearances. Half of an employee's pay is paid in an annual bonus, which is determined by a mixture of objective and subjective factors. It is not enough to be a good worker, an employee must also make sure he looks like a good worker - which entails being seen in the office a lot. The time of a junior employee is not considered valuable, since they are well overpaid compared to their peers their bosses feel like they should be willing to take unlimited shit without bitching. Managing Directors think nothing of asking an Analyst to do something on Sunday when it pops into their minds, even if the work could easily wait until Monday morning. An MD will also have no qualms about asking an Analyst to start on something at 7PM when he could have told him about it hours earlier. You have never seen so many bitter 23 year-olds as you can find at an I-Banking office.

In exchange for most of your life, an entry-level employee is usually compensated well for someone just out of college. I'd estimate the mean analyst on the street earns $120K in an average year. I wasn't on the street, but I'm not working right now thanks to my savings from my days as an I-Banker. If I could do it again, I probably wouldn't. I like where I am but those were a bleak, desolate 2 years and the angina hasn't completely faded away yet.