Shopify CEO says long hours aren't necessary for success • Hacker News Board

Re: Shopify CEO says long hours aren't necessary for success

#101

Post by pm90 » Fri, Dec 27, 2019, 7:22 PM UTC

nwienert wrote: post #83

derision wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue one cup of coffee a day every single day is questionable. We shouldn't be drugging ourselves just to reach some arbitrary deadlines

You’re getting downvoted but I strongly believe coffee is a huge net negative on productivity especially in the long run. It has two scary effects: one is it seems to sacrifice some creativity for some raw output (along with a sort of scattered and less human feel to communication). Two is that it degrades sleep quality. Which probably means a lack of memory formation at the margin over long time periods. These are j…

Hmm, I like coffee very much but I don't really use it to get shit done as much as to open my mind to creative thinking. Perhaps I'm using it differently than most people do?

Without coffee, I will feel sluggish and sleepy all morning. With coffee, I feel alert and inquisitive. I have a rule against drinking coffee after noon, so it doesn't affect my sleep patterns.

Discovering coffee in college was really what allowed me to read things for long hours. I like the fact that it activates inquisitiveness a lot more than that it enables productivity. This is a purely subjective experience, I admit.

Re: Shopify CEO says long hours aren't necessary for success

#102

Post by 3pt14159 » Fri, Dec 27, 2019, 7:23 PM UTC

eigenvector wrote: post #33

arcticbull wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not to imply that long hours are necessary. I think they're abhorrent. But they're also endemic. That's definitely true of the Bay Area, but Shopify is an Ottawa, Canada company. Having gone to college there, I don't get the feeling that Tobi is doing anything out of the ordinary for an Ottawa company. That may not be the case in Kitchener/Waterloo or Vancouver -- and it's definitely not true of the Bay Area -- but…

For those who are not familiar, Ottawa is Canada's capital and its labour market is dominated by government jobs. It's a very 9 to 5 (actually, more like 9 to 4:30) culture and anything else would be a shock to the system for most people.

The people in Ottawa are so nice, and the bilingualism is pleasant and if you're comfortable living on the Quebec side of Ottawa, housing is dirt cheap, something like 2x or 3x gross salary.

I just wish it had a night life. The expression "nothing good in Ottawa happens after 8pm" is funny because politicians mean it one way, while people from Toronto mean it the other.

Re: Shopify CEO says long hours aren't necessary for success

#103

Post by joshuamorton » Fri, Dec 27, 2019, 7:24 PM UTC

NathanKP wrote: post #74

mikeg8 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>How anyone can say this with a straight face blows my mind Elon is the only person to ever start four 1bn+ companies (paypal, tesla, SpaceX, Solarcity). He has/is driving innovation across multiple industries on a time scale that I don't think any of the people you mentioned can really touch, not to mention hyperloop and the Boring Company. Its not even debatable IMO.

I'd still say that John Rockefeller is more impressive. Adjusted for inflation John Rockefeller's company Standard Oil was worth over $1 trillion. Or Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, the guy who started the Dutch East India company, which adjusted for inflation was worth over $8.2 trillion. Modern companies have nothing on what entrepreneurs did in the past and how much money they made. It doesn't matter how many markets El…

Microsoft and Apple are both worth over 1T at the moment.

Granted, DEIC is in a league of its own, but it was also a state sponsored company, more akin to Saudi-ARAMCO (2T).

Re: Shopify CEO says long hours aren't necessary for success

#104

Post by mcpherrinm » Fri, Dec 27, 2019, 7:24 PM UTC

ivl wrote: post #55

dang wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! We changed the URL to that from https://www.businessinsider.com/shopify-ceo-success-long-hou... , which is mostly just reporting on it. What does the s=20 do?

> What does the s=20 do? Seems to be tacked on by Twitter to track the source of shares. Pretty sure the number changes by device.

s=20 is shared from mobile website (iOS and android tested). 21 is iOS app. Don't have others to test offhand.

There's a Twitter thread from a few years ago where a few folk collected a bunch of them, but I can't find it anymore.

Re: Shopify CEO says long hours aren't necessary for success

#105

Post by forkerenok » Fri, Dec 27, 2019, 7:26 PM UTC

NathanKP wrote: post #74

mikeg8 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>How anyone can say this with a straight face blows my mind Elon is the only person to ever start four 1bn+ companies (paypal, tesla, SpaceX, Solarcity). He has/is driving innovation across multiple industries on a time scale that I don't think any of the people you mentioned can really touch, not to mention hyperloop and the Boring Company. Its not even debatable IMO.

I'd still say that John Rockefeller is more impressive. Adjusted for inflation John Rockefeller's company Standard Oil was worth over $1 trillion. Or Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, the guy who started the Dutch East India company, which adjusted for inflation was worth over $8.2 trillion. Modern companies have nothing on what entrepreneurs did in the past and how much money they made. It doesn't matter how many markets El…

From the Wikipedia article on Dutch East India Company:

"The company has been criticised for its monopolistic policy, exploitation, colonialism, uses of violence, and slavery."

I'm pretty sure many of the today's companies would do just as well or even better if they could have their own military force and free ticket on slavery.

Re: Shopify CEO says long hours aren't necessary for success

#106

Post by hintymad » Fri, Dec 27, 2019, 7:26 PM UTC

These successful people sound like working long hours is an absolute evil. I think they underestimate the effort that an ordinary person needs to be even moderately successful. What if it takes me twice as long to debug a problem as my team's standard? What if a concept is so simple to everyone else in my team yet it's just so hard for me to understand? What if I see an opportunity to build a truly great product, yet I don't have the required technical background while I have at most two weeks to catch up? What if I really want to tap into machine learning yet I have meetings all day, so my only choice is to study after work? Now, before you ask me to switch my career, what if I do have a passion in tech and I'm even worse at doing anything else?

See? Working long hours sometimes is not a burden, but a choice, a choice that one makes to master what they love, and to make sure they won't regret wasting their life when looking back years later. And sometimes working long hours, as long as it's voluntary, is the only way to succeed.

Re: Shopify CEO says long hours aren't necessary for success

#107

Post by parthdesai » Fri, Dec 27, 2019, 7:27 PM UTC

natalyarostova wrote: post #88

parthdesai wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm asking this seriously, but how much of that was actual work done? I would be pretty surprised if you said that you actually worked for entire 4 hours between 8-12.

It’s just not comparable to IC work. In each of those meetings as an exec he probably makes 1 important decision. If he didn’t make that decision correctly it could cost his org weeks or millions of dollars. That is work, but exec work is just different.

Right, I completely agree, but him saying that he worked for entitreity of those 4 hours is a bit misleading imo. We all know how "efficient" these meetings are.

Re: Shopify CEO says long hours aren't necessary for success

#108

Post by AndrewKemendo » Fri, Dec 27, 2019, 7:27 PM UTC

natalyarostova wrote: post #88

parthdesai wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm asking this seriously, but how much of that was actual work done? I would be pretty surprised if you said that you actually worked for entire 4 hours between 8-12.

It’s just not comparable to IC work. In each of those meetings as an exec he probably makes 1 important decision. If he didn’t make that decision correctly it could cost his org weeks or millions of dollars. That is work, but exec work is just different.

+1 to this. It's different work - though the problem solving is the same in many ways.

Think about it like this, in many of these meetings you're look at a multivariate problem with very few reference outcomes for any given decision path and you need to come up with a solution that doesn't break the other parts of the system. Sound familiar?

Depending on what kind of decision is made, dozens or hundreds of people will have to change how they work, so the cost is high and in many cases the longer you wait to make a decision the more technical debt you have etc... so time is really a factor because people are already working.

For example we needed to come to some consensus on the RPC format we were going to use because one group used JSON, another Protobuf, another XML and other organizations wanted us to use older complex formats like USMTF and UCI to be interoperable. So do we create anticorruption layers and let everyone just do whatever they want? how do we prioritize our streaming consumers and producers? Should we switch everyone to Avro? Etc... you get the idea.

Re: Shopify CEO says long hours aren't necessary for success

#109

Post by bertr4nd » Fri, Dec 27, 2019, 7:29 PM UTC

I always like Richard Hamming’s take on hours worked: “ Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest.'' Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works ten percent more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former.” (From “You and Your Research”: https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html)

I started incorporating this thinking into my own work schedule, and I believe it to be true. I certainly found that I grew incredibly quickly in my abilities when I started working more (as long as I was applying the hours intelligently, which is admittedly its own trick)

Re: Shopify CEO says long hours aren't necessary for success

#110

Post by pc86 » Fri, Dec 27, 2019, 7:30 PM UTC

lonelappde wrote: post #87

pc86 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Medical residents routinely do close to 80 hours, and I would argue on average a small single digit number of those hours are unproductive. My SO is an OB resident and worked over 90 hours last week, and probably 75 of that was either in surgery, reading, studying, or giving a presentation of one form or another. About half of her weeks are above the 80 hour limit. It's definitely possible. Just because we don't want…

Which hospital is that violating the legal limits on hours per week?

Every single one of them.

I'm aware of the legal limit and every single resident I've met has broken it at least once (really at least a couple times every quarter). The "good" programs will at least not require their residents to lie about it.