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Success at Work, Failure at Home

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Re: Success at Work, Failure at Home

#61

Post by larrys »

MWil wrote: post #40
yitchelle wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really depends on the kid's age. Younger kids (less than 10yrs) are not able to grasp the concept of money or earning money, so explaining that dad is out making money for a roof over their head and putting food on the table is not going to cut it. At that age, they just want close interaction with their dad.

I'm happy to be proven wrong and of course this is only anecdotally but I was watching sci-fi movies at age 10 and I could grasp, at least on the surface, the underlying technology and it's purpose. When we say "kids dont understand money" I'm thinking they should start to get it at about 7 and certainly have a basic grasp by 10.

Kids will fully understand what is brainwashed (used in a positive way) into them.

If they are raised to believe that work is necessary and the spouse who is with them while the working spouse is away doesn't whine, complain or fight with them about it then they will learn that it is something necessary. And guess what? If they don't that's to bad. You do what you think is in the best interest of your children long term not short term because you won't be around. In no way are they going to understand why you can't be at the ball game or the school play but later if you are out of work and/or you can't pay for their college that they will understand and they won't say "oh that's ok at least you came and saw me make that basket".

Re: Success at Work, Failure at Home

#62

Post by nostrademons »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #5

I very clearly remember the week this clicked in my brain. Being very successful, really crushing it, and whining to my wife that the company should give more vacation, and her reminding me that I had been at work on Christmas Eve. My whole perspective collapsed around that instant. I could see the hit in career path I was going to take by changing my perspective, but I decided to do it anyway. And I have always been…

I've often wondered about this, whether it's possible to still be a big career success and compete against those who are willing to give up their whole personal life for it. I'm not entirely certain I've got an answer, but the solution that comes to me is to make use of certain competitive advantages you have that they don't:

1.) When you're heads-down on a goal, you often miss other things that are going on in the world, like technology shifts or social changes that may affect your business. Someone who makes time for a social life will be much better informed about these, because they have more information coming in from friends and acquaintances.

2.) People who work all their time often get very good at repressing their emotions, because emotionally, it really sucks to work all the time. That blinds them to an important source of information, which makes them make poor global optimizations about their time usage because the rational brain isn't as effective as the emotional brain at processing large amounts of not-directly-comparable information.

3.) People who get used to working all the time often get very impatient and feel they must be doing something productive with every moment. This makes them unsuitable for jobs which require that you sit back and wait.

The biggest example I can think of of people using these against their competitors is Warren Buffett, who's famously built a massive investment firm by being "patient capital", that's willing to wait out the periodic panics and take advantage of them. While the rest of the financial industry runs around like chickens with their heads off, he sits back in Omaha, with a normal middle-class lifestyle, and waits for their emotions to get the best of them and make them do something. And then he swoops in at reduced prices, buys, and waits for the price to come around again.

Re: Success at Work, Failure at Home

#63

Post by Jare »

MWil wrote: post #40
yitchelle wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really depends on the kid's age. Younger kids (less than 10yrs) are not able to grasp the concept of money or earning money, so explaining that dad is out making money for a roof over their head and putting food on the table is not going to cut it. At that age, they just want close interaction with their dad.

I'm happy to be proven wrong and of course this is only anecdotally but I was watching sci-fi movies at age 10 and I could grasp, at least on the surface, the underlying technology and it's purpose. When we say "kids dont understand money" I'm thinking they should start to get it at about 7 and certainly have a basic grasp by 10.

When I was 7 years old, I distinctly remember telling my dad "I give you all my money" (my parents never had money, and had a few pretty rough periods). At the time I did not make the rationalization that the money was coming from him anyway, but I sure knew giving it to him meant I would not be able to buy my candies and stuff.

I also didn't really understand what his job meant, but I knew it was among the "stuff that needs to get done even if you don't like it and don't know why you have to", of which I had my own share (cleaning the room, etc).

It was never a (big) problem when he or my mom weren't around for reasons we didn't understand; what mattered was that when they were with us they were WITH US. Reading, telling stories or listening to ours, going hiking or playing sports, teaching maths or showing how to beat an egg.

Re: Success at Work, Failure at Home

#64

Post by sokoloff »

tdurden wrote: post #57

> When we started pulling consistent coding weekends, we brought in the entire management team to serve the engineers: We brought them food, washed their cars, got oil changes, took in their dry cleaning, and arranged for childcare for their kids in the office. Sorry, but while admirable, this is not normal. I may differ from most of HN, but I simply don't see the point in making these kinds of sacrifices as an engin…

That's not the point. The management team is showing solidarity with their team by serving them in the only (more symbolic than economically valuable) ways that they can.

It's a symbolic (but real) sharing of the sacrifice, not a straight up bribe.

Same reason I've come in on Christmas night (we scheduled the work after the families are reasonably in bed, but the calendar still said "12/25") to spend time with my teams doing major site maintenance activities, or why I travelled with the team for a major as-the-ball-dropped New Year's Eve datacenter migration. It's not because I'm especially good at carrying servers or building SAN racks...

The engineers make the sacrifice because they believe it's necessary for the product/company to succeed. They feel better about it because their executives are physically present there with them rather than on a golf course or diving into their pools of gold coins...

Re: Success at Work, Failure at Home

#65

Post by ececconi »

001sky wrote: post #50
thrownaway2424 wrote: post #17

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 staye…

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 a…

Got the same impression.

Re: Success at Work, Failure at Home

#66

Post by undershirt »

I want to relate this to Richard Branson's family advice to Elon Musk sprinkled throughout a recent Google Hangout[1].

> I hope he can find some wonderful people to help him. He's got five children at home, all boys... he just, uh, he needs to... uh, yeah, I hope you can find lots of time. You just got to find lots of people to help you.

I can't imagine the kind of family life Elon Musk can have if he has five boys while running two companies. He advises young entrepreneurs to work 70-80 hour weeks as a clear no-brainer way to get ahead. Hearing the hesitation in Richard Branson's voice in the quote above says a lot about this I think.

[1]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vy9y_YSpYxA&feature=share&t=5...

Re: Success at Work, Failure at Home

#67

Post by Bahamut »

larrys wrote: post #56
codingdave wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a common misunderstanding in young families, and one that causes a lot of damage to families in the long run. The misunderstanding is the assumption that the wife was not working all day. IF she has a job, then she was working. If she stays at home with kids, she was also working. Coming home and relaxing, saying, "Hey, I'm paying the mortgage" is also saying, "Hey, the work my wife did today was worth nothin…

"If she stays at home with kids, she was also working." I think it's reasonable to believe that some jobs are harder than other jobs. Staying home with the kids, while hard (and maybe even boring) isn't as demanding as the jobs that some people have. I have to tell you that I'd rather the person who operates on a heart or a brain or flys a 777 (and there are many more I'm just picking a few obvious ones) focus on the…

But the spouse is making sacrifices for you to focus on your career. It's a different kind of hard & still is demanding.

Re: Success at Work, Failure at Home

#68

Post by yetanotherphd »

Myrmornis wrote: post #30

I dare say I'll get voted down for not being constructive, but I find the self-help entrepreneurship work-life balance stuff on here really self-involved and kind of tasteless.

How dare a person be concerned about their own life and wellbeing, and not whatever minority group is being promoted this week. Why do rich, White, privileged founders think their lives are of any interest on news.ycombinator.com anyway?

Re: Success at Work, Failure at Home

#69

Post by TeMPOraL »

crusso wrote: post #46
sriramk wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 1…

> 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.

Re: Success at Work, Failure at Home

#70

Post by potatolicious »

crusso wrote: post #46
sriramk wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 1…

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.

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