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A 60-Hour Work Week is Not a Badge of Honour
61–70 of 323 posts
Re: A 60-Hour Work Week is Not a Badge of Honour
#62I work 40 hours a week at maximum - most weeks I work about 34 to 38 hours. You 80 hours a week guys, what the hell are you doing with your time? Are you divorced? No family? No friends? Is 'disrupting' an industry really that important to you?
My name is Rick and I'm a 80 hour a week guy. I'm 26, single, and have no pets. I have a family and friends, but I'm very transparent about my work habits and priorities as a full-stack engineer. Being so young, I see myself as training to be the person I want to be in the future. The best programmers in the world worked at it relentlessly. Sure, there are variances in the amount that they all worked, and some did it…
I admire your passion and dedication to having a positive impact on the world.
My challenge to you is this: What gives you confidence that the impact you'll have on the world will in fact be positive?
Engineering certainly gives us the ability to impact the world. Increasingly and since the first industrial revolution power goes to the greatest engineers. But are the skills that give us the ability to change the world really sufficient to decide what change is best? For that, I believe we need wisdom and understanding far outside our field of expertise, and in the evening and on the weekend we should be reading not just Javascript Ninja but also books on history, philosophy, political theory, literature, and psychology - if we want to optimize the chance that our impact will truly be positive.
Re: A 60-Hour Work Week is Not a Badge of Honour
#63I work 40 hours a week at maximum - most weeks I work about 34 to 38 hours. You 80 hours a week guys, what the hell are you doing with your time? Are you divorced? No family? No friends? Is 'disrupting' an industry really that important to you?
My name is Rick and I'm a 80 hour a week guy. I'm 26, single, and have no pets. I have a family and friends, but I'm very transparent about my work habits and priorities as a full-stack engineer. Being so young, I see myself as training to be the person I want to be in the future. The best programmers in the world worked at it relentlessly. Sure, there are variances in the amount that they all worked, and some did it…
Hi, I'm Adam, 27, married with a two year old and one more on the way. I commend your efforts and wish you luck. Some small percentage of people who start out down the path you're on make it to the end as true technical experts.
All I will do is put in a word that most people who start down that track don't finish, but they still get a chance to change the world. Their chance comes through the coworkers they mentor, the spouses whose less-profitable careers their high-paying programming jobs support, and the children who they raise with, hopefully, some psychological balance.
Remember that this path is just as hard, requires as much thinking and practice, and is mastered by just as few people. For now, if you don't think that's what you're called to, great. But there's nothing to be embarrassed about if you find out later that it is.
And if you get to that realization, approach the rest of life with the same zeal you poured into becoming a technical expert, plus perhaps a bit of new-found humility. Practice constantly, seek help from books and from people who have thought about the problem extensively (religious leaders, therapists, or trusted friends), and remember that you're in training as an excellent person to be.
(Edit: I guess I should also say, I'm not sure the options are exclusive. I've read the books you mention, I've spoken at JSConf, and I've built some really incredible things, all while never regularly working more than a normal workweek.)
Re: A 60-Hour Work Week is Not a Badge of Honour
#64This false dichotomy is seriously getting annoying. If 60 hours is sustainable for you, do it. If only 30 hours is sustainable for you, do that instead. But stop imposing onto others what is right or wrong when there are so many factors at play. Some of my most productive memories are summers studying and working for 12 hours a day, 6 days a week (= 72 hours). I didn't get tired, burned out, or anything. Another summ…
>If only 30 hours is sustainable for you, do that instead.
This is not an option for most us.
Re: A 60-Hour Work Week is Not a Badge of Honour
#65This false dichotomy is seriously getting annoying. If 60 hours is sustainable for you, do it. If only 30 hours is sustainable for you, do that instead. But stop imposing onto others what is right or wrong when there are so many factors at play. Some of my most productive memories are summers studying and working for 12 hours a day, 6 days a week (= 72 hours). I didn't get tired, burned out, or anything. Another summ…
+1 to recognizing that the ability to sustain work volume is unique and personal. The issue comes in when you are asking someone capable of doing a 40 hour/week job to output 60 hours. That ask will ultimately break that person.
Re: A 60-Hour Work Week is Not a Badge of Honour
#66This false dichotomy is seriously getting annoying. If 60 hours is sustainable for you, do it. If only 30 hours is sustainable for you, do that instead. But stop imposing onto others what is right or wrong when there are so many factors at play. Some of my most productive memories are summers studying and working for 12 hours a day, 6 days a week (= 72 hours). I didn't get tired, burned out, or anything. Another summ…
+1 to recognizing that the ability to sustain work volume is unique and personal. The issue comes in when you are asking someone capable of doing a 40 hour/week job to output 60 hours. That ask will ultimately break that person.
Edit: Or run them out.
Re: A 60-Hour Work Week is Not a Badge of Honour
#67This false dichotomy is seriously getting annoying. If 60 hours is sustainable for you, do it. If only 30 hours is sustainable for you, do that instead. But stop imposing onto others what is right or wrong when there are so many factors at play. Some of my most productive memories are summers studying and working for 12 hours a day, 6 days a week (= 72 hours). I didn't get tired, burned out, or anything. Another summ…
> But stop imposing onto others what is right or wrong
Well. I am not sure anything is being imposed here. The original is just a blog by someone stating that working too long (by his definition) is not something he considers a badge of honor/skill/awesomeness. You don't have to follow the recommendation.
Re: A 60-Hour Work Week is Not a Badge of Honour
#68This false dichotomy is seriously getting annoying. If 60 hours is sustainable for you, do it. If only 30 hours is sustainable for you, do that instead. But stop imposing onto others what is right or wrong when there are so many factors at play. Some of my most productive memories are summers studying and working for 12 hours a day, 6 days a week (= 72 hours). I didn't get tired, burned out, or anything. Another summ…
Statistics tell a different story. There were numerous studies on productivity relative to many measures.
Then again, you know, you might be a actual snowflake...
Re: A 60-Hour Work Week is Not a Badge of Honour
#69When I was 25 to 29, I used to spend a lot of time at work. For a while, it just came naturally because I was so eager to learn; I'd stay at work reading books, programming, looking for information on the web and newsgroups (I hadn't internet access at home back then).
But at some point in 1998, for a few months we entered in death march after accepting to be the rescue team for a doomed, undoable project; I've worked 100 to 120 hours a week for 4 months, one of my colleague burnt out like a candle (I remember him asleep the face literally on his keyboard, late at night, while waiting for compilation to end; two days later he lied on an hospital bed) and after that I had serious health problems repeatedly for several years. We had the satisfaction to actually save the project and make the deadline, but two of us ended in hospital, and most on the team had serious family, health of other serious problems afterwards.
So what to say? Know your limits. Don't try to push it to far; it's actually very easy to kill oneself, for instance falling asleep at the wheel, late at night, on the way back home after a very long day.
Re: A 60-Hour Work Week is Not a Badge of Honour
#70This false dichotomy is seriously getting annoying. If 60 hours is sustainable for you, do it. If only 30 hours is sustainable for you, do that instead. But stop imposing onto others what is right or wrong when there are so many factors at play. Some of my most productive memories are summers studying and working for 12 hours a day, 6 days a week (= 72 hours). I didn't get tired, burned out, or anything. Another summ…
>If only 30 hours is sustainable for you, do that instead. This is not an option for most us.
Not an option?