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Success at Work, Failure at Home

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Re: Success at Work, Failure at Home

#151

Post by ececconi »

blazespin wrote: post #121
vasilipupkin wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

I agree with your statement. He said the company had a great work life balance policy, but his descriptions of it contradicted that.

Re: Success at Work, Failure at Home

#152

Post by moreentropy »

mortyseinfeld wrote: post #147
moreentropy wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well if you're the boss it's your right to work as long as you want, but it's not OK to abuse your employees and make them work ridiculous hours.

Your boss can't make you work ridiculous hours

Correct me if I'm wrong, i don't know the rules in the us, in Germany you're simply not allowed to work more than an average of eight hours per day. So you can not only not be forced to work more, you can't even be asked to. Even if it seems to be voluntary, often it isn't.

Re: Success at Work, Failure at Home

#153

Post by mratzloff »

sokoloff wrote: post #148
mratzloff wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But who plans a New Year's Eve datacenter migration? What kind of major site maintenance is needed on Christmas? It's one thing if it's an unplanned emergency. It's another entirely if it's planned. Planning for work on Christmas or New Year's Eve would be enough to convince me to find employment elsewhere.

Well, we planned a NYE DC move (5 years ago I think), and years before that we didn't have the capability to do certain DB tasks with the site on-line, so we also planned the 2300 on 12/25 work. (And back in 2004, we couldn't even do releases with the site on-line, so we did regularly scheduled releases on Mondays starting at 1 AM with the outage starting at 2 AM...) How does this happen? Suppose we find ourselves ru…

Thank you for the detailed response. It's a good outcome that the sacrifices of systems teams are more widely recognized in your company now; at many companies they are not.

Online maintenance is how we do all our maintenance. Getting to that point as early as possible is essential for redundancy and failover, anyway, so it is both good for the company and good for the systems team.

Re: Success at Work, Failure at Home

#154

Post by sokoloff »

mratzloff wrote: post #153
sokoloff wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, we planned a NYE DC move (5 years ago I think), and years before that we didn't have the capability to do certain DB tasks with the site on-line, so we also planned the 2300 on 12/25 work. (And back in 2004, we couldn't even do releases with the site on-line, so we did regularly scheduled releases on Mondays starting at 1 AM with the outage starting at 2 AM...) How does this happen? Suppose we find ourselves ru…

Thank you for the detailed response. It's a good outcome that the sacrifices of systems teams are more widely recognized in your company now; at many companies they are not. Online maintenance is how we do all our maintenance. Getting to that point as early as possible is essential for redundancy and failover, anyway, so it is both good for the company and good for the systems team.

Online maintenance is huge, and it's somewhat easier to design for now than it was 10 years ago.

It's very nice to be able to schedule releases at a human/humane time and there's really only one point in our release process now where it's impossible to very obviously and fairly automatically revert and regroup. That one point is clearly called out, and the decision is easy to make when the site has been operating on live traffic for 60 minutes with zero perceptible technical and business metrics degradation.

I'd not consider online maint capability to be a necessary part of an MVP, since any time you spend on it is unlikely to help you understand whether you even HAVE a business, but I'd prioritize it pretty highly in the very next phase of company development.

Re: Success at Work, Failure at Home

#155

Post by overgryphon »

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…

My experience is that people who consistently overwork and choose work over their family life feel that those who don't are lazy. The inability to have reasonable expectations of others, and tendency to look down on coworkers can undermine large projects or create a reputation of being incapable of working with others. This can limit their career, especially at senior levels where employees are expected to coordinate high risk projects across many people or serve as a mentor for newer employees.

Re: Success at Work, Failure at Home

#156

Post by epx »

philwelch wrote: post #132
epx wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hardest part is when the kid asks for something and you don't have money.

Really? Geez, that was easy for my parents. "We can't afford it." Getting your kids whatever they ask for is a terrible idea anyway.

Obviously I was referring to basic needs, not to the latest 100-pack of Hot Wheels Color Shifters.

Re: Success at Work, Failure at Home

#157

Post by wpietri »

eps wrote: post #139
wpietri wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-pres... But even if none of that human-factors stuff were true, I'd still…

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 n…

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.

Re: Success at Work, Failure at Home

#158

Post by philwelch »

epx wrote: post #156
philwelch wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? Geez, that was easy for my parents. "We can't afford it." Getting your kids whatever they ask for is a terrible idea anyway.

Obviously I was referring to basic needs, not to the latest 100-pack of Hot Wheels Color Shifters.

Yeah...it must be pretty bad when your kids have to ask for food and shelter.

Re: Success at Work, Failure at Home

#159

Post by shortlived »

undershirt wrote: post #66

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 w…

At what point in the vid do they talk about family?

Re: Success at Work, Failure at Home

#160

Post by marvin »

ececconi wrote: post #150
burgreblast wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if you might have skipped or didn't relate to the 50% - 75% travel part. In my experience it's not the travel, per se, even though the jet lag can be killer. It means being On 100% of the time you're away. The raw number of hours of being Always On for your company--around the world, with different people in different contexts--creates an emotional distance to one's family, because your mental world becomes…

I'm just surprised he didn't say anything about making his subordinates work less. He said the company had a work life balance policy, then talked about how the engineers were always in on the weekends. PS-- I'm on the road every Mon thru Thursday and pretty much live in a hotel. I didn't relate to this pierce. It's. Rey possible, then, I don't have the skills to be a CEO.

It's just lip service. The impression I get from reading Hacker News is that practically no SV company has anything resembling a work-life balance. And the "choose your own vacation time" companies are in reality anything but. It's completely disingenious.
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