161–169 of 169 posts
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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
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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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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 prod…
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Oooh, that could be a controversial point of view. I've done a fair bit of the stay-at-home dad thing and I found it HARD. There something unremitting about dealing with the demands of small children while trying to keep the house clean and food on the table (and while my office life was all about getting rid of repetitive tasks, stuff like cleaning and cooking just has to be done again and again, which I found very…
Very much agreed. For me staying home with my kid is much harder than going to work. It is boring, repetitive, frustrating...mentally draining.
Or get an iPad.
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I guess the European peons did learn some lessons from all the centuries of oppression under the feudal nobility. The Americans never had that experience, so they bought into the company line hook line and sinker.
If you're going to attribute history to why the workforce in Europe is the way it is, then the American expectation of the peons to work all the time is because the US never got over having slave labour. BTW that line of thinking is ridiculous. Europeans and Americans learned about feudalism the same way, from history books. No one who was around when labour laws were going into effect has first, second or third hand…
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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 prod…
I don't particularly care for what links demonstrate, but I'm sure that people who are forced to work 80-hour schedule are very far from being twice as productive. However having worked under the 80-hour routine myself on my own project for two years I can assure you that it sure as hell helped to achieve a lot more and a lot faster. It's really a matter of motivation. Will I do it again? No ...but then I don't reall…
I believe that for certain sorts of work, 80-hour weeks might be more productive than 40-hour weeks. E.g., digging ditches (at least for the very young and very healthy). But in software the costs of error are so high, and so hard to trace back, that it will take very solid studies to convince me that the increased error rates from long hours really are counterbalanced by the large number of hours put in.
I'm facing many of the challenges Scott is talking about. I churned through the first part of the essay and thought "yes! yes! yes, yes, let's get to the solution!" But the second part of the essay falls short for me. It's a bit like the depression and the broken hand cartoon[1]. I can't disconnect. I know I'm supposed to turn off my phone, do household chores, and take my wife out to a nice dinner. I know taking the…
> The solution, at least for me, is as elusive as ever. If you define "the problem" as "I want to work 80 hours/week + have a healthy family life", well, yes, that's always going to be elusive. I.e. impossible. Pretty sure the answer is to just not work 80 hours/week. > but it's not something I can decide to change either It is probably convenient for you to think that, but unless you have some sort of mental health…
So what would you say to the young [insert famous and wealthy figure here]?
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?
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> The solution, at least for me, is as elusive as ever. If you define "the problem" as "I want to work 80 hours/week + have a healthy family life", well, yes, that's always going to be elusive. I.e. impossible. Pretty sure the answer is to just not work 80 hours/week. > but it's not something I can decide to change either It is probably convenient for you to think that, but unless you have some sort of mental health…
It is probably convenient for you to think that, but unless you have some sort of mental health condition (delusions of grandeur, etc.), I doubt it. So what would you say to the young [insert famous and wealthy figure here]?
At least when you have kids. I could see a spouse being okay with "5-10 years of hard work" for lots of freedom after that.
Hard to make that sacrifice with kids though, because after 5-10 years, they're basically not kids anymore.
Ironically, if the 5-10 years works out, and the kids have a guaranteed life of luxury because of it, they might be grateful.
But I don't think it usually works out that way.
(Note that I'm only focusing on the "80 hours/week" thing. If you can pull off "changing the world" (or at least your pocket book) on 40 hours/week, more power to you.)