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A contrarian take on working long hours

allisonpickens.substack.com

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Re: A contrarian take on working long hours

#71

Post by ankit219 »

People have different styles of working. I have found that if I am deep into a problem, dedicating long hours to solve it is more productive as I have the context for longer time and can try out different things as I am deep in the zone. It is not as simplistic as "they work long hours because they don't have product market fit.". I like to solve problems, engage my brain, and the kind of intellectual simulation I get while working is something I can't get outside of work. I would regularly dedicated 12 hours a day and work on weekends, and when I am out of the zone, I will take a break for a few days, recover my energy and then go back to work.

I had an employer who was exactly like that, so understood it better than others, giving me the leeway. Infact, most of my colleagues were like that. We had our own social life beyond the office, but I did not feel like socializing everyday anyway.

Re: A contrarian take on working long hours

#72

Post by r00tanon »

TameAntelope wrote: post #13

I'll give you an actual contrarian take on working long hours: I like it, and I'm really tired of people commenting on what hours I keep. I enjoy my work. It's what I'd be doing in my spare time if I didn't need or have this job. I've thought about this, and I think I'd stick around at my role even if I hit a windfall, because I want to see this through to the end, one way or another. Sometimes, in order to do the ki…

Enjoy it while you can. Realize though that being "employee #1" and wearing all the hats while working with others that "share your values" means they probably think they themselves are "employee #1" and wearing all the hats, which obviously can't be the case in a well functioning team.

I'd hate to see how that works in a large project - like SpaceX where teams have to build things.

IOW, consider you may be better off running your own show while you have this drive. And realize you'll want to hire the best and brightest regardless of their WLB preferences.

Currently it sounds like all the effort you are spending is in service to someone else's vision, and it better have equity involvement on your part because you WILL get interested in other things and unless you've built a war chest for your own ambitions, your work will be for nothing when you inevitably walk away - hopefully to do you own thing.

Don't make the mistake that your employer has your long-term interest in mind. It's not personal, it's just business. It's always what have you done for me lately

Re: A contrarian take on working long hours

#73

Post by throwaway-m3232 »

Ah, some stupid Silicon valley bullshit. Programming and many more things done there, is not work. Yeah, it looks like work, but it is not, it does not produce something necessary for biological living or education or life support. It is more like: I like reading, I read 18 h/day. OK, cool.

Work is something that is done to reproduce life. Programming, reading, is not work, it is life activity itself, do it as you like.

Example 2: it does make sense to optimize biologically needed production. But it does not make really sense to optimize life activity. I like cycling, I measure my performance, but I'm ok that some people cycle just for fun.

Re: A contrarian take on working long hours

#74

Post by TameAntelope »

laserlight wrote: post #51
TameAntelope wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completed 32 pomodoros last week, which is above my average of ~25 for the past year and change, and a lot of my job isn't focused work, and none of that pomodoro time included any of the project management, meetings, or conversations I had with the team to figure out what we're up to, what the problems are, and what we're doing next. But that's not the point. The point is the 9-5ers have held the higher moral grou…

Is 32 pomodoros equal to 32*25 = 800 minutes (13h 20m)?

A pomodoro is four 25 minute sessions with a 5 minute break between each session.

One "pomodoro" takes 2 hours to complete.

Re: A contrarian take on working long hours

#75

Post by TameAntelope »

listenallyall wrote: post #60
TameAntelope wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wear lots of hats right now; I was employee #1 so I did whatever engineering needed doing to get our platform created and functioning. Frontend, ops, backend, selecting vendors, eventually hiring, working on compliance, helping define strategy, project management... basically anything that needs technical expertise I'm leading. ...and I'm loving every minute of it. I committed to seeing this through at least until…

It seems pretty obvious that you work at a very small company with little or no layers of management, and most likely, without any other typical constraints that most workers deal with -- like fixed hours, an inconvenient office or commute, lots of unproductive meetings, limited amount of annual PTO, lack of knowledge/understanding whether anything you do has actual impact at the company, etc. Putting in 70-80 hours…

Not sure why you think I believe it to be heroic, I just think I shouldn't be shamed for spending my time how I want to.

You'll note how the shame is being attempted in this very comment thread. It makes me sad. :(

Re: A contrarian take on working long hours

#76

Post by onion2k »

watwut wrote: post #57
onion2k wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An employer that values you will empower you with commensurate compensation. If someone on my team chose to work 80 hours a week because they loved what they do then I would actively discourage them, and remove them from the team if they continued. Having someone like that around has several negative impacts; - It makes other people resentful of the fact they have to work longer hours, or change their schedules, to k…

> It makes other people resentful of the fact they have to work longer hours, or change their schedules, to keep up with features or testing. That leads to more staff churn. It is more of resentment of lower quality of output and a lot wasted time while looking like super hard worker. People who work 80 hours a week dont have actually higher output. They get tired , myoptic and they get all their socialization in wor…

That's certainly true of some devs, but I've also seen devs who don't have that problem. Some people genuinely can write good code all night long for months on end. That's why the points I outlined aren't about the individual dev. The impact on other people is still bad even if the dev is great. All of my reasoning about why I don't want 'heroes' come down to preferring a strong team of good devs over a good team behind a brilliant dev.

Plus, if you want to make this about individualism and maybe stray into a little game theory, if a team has someone doing loads of more work than other people, one day that person is going to leave and your team will suddenly take a massive hit in productivity. That makes everyone on the team look bad. Everyone does better when there isn't an outlier (apart from the outlier, obvs).

Re: A contrarian take on working long hours

#77

Post by kranner »

DiggyJohnson wrote: post #54
kranner wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hardly needless. Employers throw out faithful and dedicated employees all the time, even in ageist industries where it is difficult for them to find another job. I saw this happen to a close friend's father; their financial stability crumbled. He seemed to have aged 10 years overnight. It was quite a few years before I saw him not visibly depressed. Despite being a talented engineer (not in software) he never found a…

How is this relevant? Presumably the reason we’re discussing bc in this thread for working longer hours isn’t job security, but job satisfaction. I don’t see how this connects, frankly.

I was responding to a comment that spoke about employers who value employees as if this is always clear to employees, or even true in the long run.

Re: A contrarian take on working long hours

#78

Post by watwut »

onion2k wrote: post #76
watwut wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It makes other people resentful of the fact they have to work longer hours, or change their schedules, to keep up with features or testing. That leads to more staff churn. It is more of resentment of lower quality of output and a lot wasted time while looking like super hard worker. People who work 80 hours a week dont have actually higher output. They get tired , myoptic and they get all their socialization in wor…

That's certainly true of some devs, but I've also seen devs who don't have that problem. Some people genuinely can write good code all night long for months on end. That's why the points I outlined aren't about the individual dev. The impact on other people is still bad even if the dev is great. All of my reasoning about why I don't want 'heroes' come down to preferring a strong team of good devs over a good team beh…

> Some people genuinely can write good code all night long for months on end.

Yes. What they can't is do it all night long and all day long for months on end.

There are people whose hourly output is twice as múch as normal. I would even say that hourly output variation is much higher then "how many hours per week you are effective" in terms of output. And none of the "people angry because they have to test too much" ever happens.

Re: A contrarian take on working long hours

#79

Post by [deleted] »

TameAntelope wrote: post #13

I'll give you an actual contrarian take on working long hours: I like it, and I'm really tired of people commenting on what hours I keep. I enjoy my work. It's what I'd be doing in my spare time if I didn't need or have this job. I've thought about this, and I think I'd stick around at my role even if I hit a windfall, because I want to see this through to the end, one way or another. Sometimes, in order to do the ki…

[deleted]

Re: A contrarian take on working long hours

#80

Post by laserlight »

TameAntelope wrote: post #74
laserlight wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is 32 pomodoros equal to 32*25 = 800 minutes (13h 20m)?

A pomodoro is four 25 minute sessions with a 5 minute break between each session. One "pomodoro" takes 2 hours to complete.

That makes 32x25x4 = 3200 minutes (53h 20m), which is a significant amount of time for focused work.
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