Live data from Hacker News

People Who Claim to Work 75-Hour Weeks Usually Only Work About 50 Hours

nymag.com

131–140 of 243 posts

Re: People Who Claim to Work 75-Hour Weeks Usually Only Work About 50 Hours

#131
I worked for a period of my life (around two years) a sustained 100+ hour workload (real work). I literally did nothing but work, eat and work, and sleep seven days a week. The only times I didn’t work was in the bathroom.

I didn’t get physically ill or burn out, but I slowly started to drift away from reality. The quality of my judgment calls started to decline and while never doing anything outright crazy, I did and said things that in hindsight were very strange.

One of the side effects of this is I had no idea what happened in the world in that time. To this day I am still learning about historical events that happened in that two year period that continue to amaze me.

Re: People Who Claim to Work 75-Hour Weeks Usually Only Work About 50 Hours

#132
post #77
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a colleague who works 14 hour days. This includes an hour nap in his car, lunch for 2 hours, and running errands/personal things outside the office for a few more hours. If he sat down and worked straight, we figured he would only need to be in the office no more than 8 hours

Sounds like he is working an 8-hour day, just during non-traditional times of the day. If that works for him and his family, and management isn't pissed off, sounds like a win-win. (Now if he claims he works 14-hour days, that's a bit dishonest.)

Yep claims he has to work till 8pm and work on weekends, but it's all due to his work habits of not doing work in a concistent manner

Re: People Who Claim to Work 75-Hour Weeks Usually Only Work About 50 Hours

#133
Some kinds of work are easier to do than others. At one point, I decided that 60 hr/wk of active work seemed the approximate sustainable limit for some typical mix of both hard&easy work, over a period of weeks or months. But even if you can schedule the hard&easy parts for fatigue, 60 hr/wk still has extra costs (e.g., stresses to health, outside relationships, outside activities, internal morale as people get irritable).

I've also done my share of all-nighters and 80-hour weeks, and it's rarely/never worth every hour. I've learned to manage projects and tasks better.

I also have some sense of how performance degrades severely by the 30 hours awake mark, and a sense that there's a ramp up to that impairment before it becomes obvious.

Most recently, I advised a developer to try for 40 productive hours of work per week, and to emphasize being sharp and non-fatigued for any task that would benefit from that. Almost all of their work required them to be sharp. Keep the 60-hour heroics in reserve for emergencies only. (Or for occasional easy flow work, like sketching out a UI skeleton in some new framework. But don't work all night on something easy, and then throw off your sleep cycle for a week when you need to be sharp for harder stuff.)

(The last time I did a weekend work marathon, which required some meticulous reverse-engineering-ish work that I think was already the work-smarter way and couldn't be sped up further, I imagined the focus and pace of an astronaut who was calm and all-business about solving some critical problem in time. That was both inspirational and also set a simple internal watchdog on my mood and how progress was going. Had I been burning stressful 60-hour weeks for months before, I might've been too fatigued/stressed to pull it off without error or poor decisions. Had I not had much experience with working long hours, I might not have appreciated how much discipline they require, and the costs.)

Re: People Who Claim to Work 75-Hour Weeks Usually Only Work About 50 Hours

#134
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

7 billion , not trillion

:P Thanks. Fun Fact I learned from that link: Supposedly, we'll be reaching our first trillion sometime between 2050 and 2060. That's actually pretty close.

That is neither fun nor a fact. Current UN projections put us on track for 9 billion in 2050, and we’ll top out at 11 or 12 billion in the early 22nd century: https://www.un.org/development/desa/publications/world-popul...

Re: People Who Claim to Work 75-Hour Weeks Usually Only Work About 50 Hours

#135
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

:P Thanks. Fun Fact I learned from that link: Supposedly, we'll be reaching our first trillion sometime between 2050 and 2060. That's actually pretty close.

If the world population is 7 billion now and will be 1,000 billion around 2055, then by my math (142.9^(1/36)) that's a growth rate of 14.8% a year. Since the current growth rate is (based on the first few hits on Google) a little over 1%, I wonder why someone would expect it to go up that drastically. Especially with global warming and everything.

You're right[1]. I should've checked a better source.

> Especially with global warming and everything.

Yes, you're also right about that. I just didn't want to throw global warming into the mix.

[1] https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/POP/TOT/

Re: People Who Claim to Work 75-Hour Weeks Usually Only Work About 50 Hours

#136
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

:P Thanks. Fun Fact I learned from that link: Supposedly, we'll be reaching our first trillion sometime between 2050 and 2060. That's actually pretty close.

That is neither fun nor a fact. Current UN projections put us on track for 9 billion in 2050, and we’ll top out at 11 or 12 billion in the early 22nd century: https://www.un.org/development/desa/publications/world-popul...

The fun was sarcasm, but you're right. I should have checked better sources.

Re: People Who Claim to Work 75-Hour Weeks Usually Only Work About 50 Hours

#137

I recently started turning up at around 10 and leaving at 4:45 and I get just as much done as when I was in the office 9-6. I've also started giving more fucks about work, which is amusing as I started showing up late and leaving early due to my lack of fucks. So in my unsanctioned (and I'm sure time limited once someone complains) experiment with a sample size of one I can say shorter days definitely keep me more en…

Well make that two.

When I got almost fired in one job, my consultancy firm asked me to return to the same client, same team, same job but in another program, I clocked the least (not giving a fuck), but I was the most productive (giving a fuck, does it make sense?:D ) and basically the program director was basing all decision on my feedbacks. It drove the previous team mad, and current one a bit speechless :D

Re: People Who Claim to Work 75-Hour Weeks Usually Only Work About 50 Hours

#138
post #45

Many years ago I was working for a small consulting firm and had a stretch of time with a lot of overtime; aka "crunch time". Since these were billable hours, time was tracked daily, even if they weren't all actually billed. The tracked hours varied over the ~6 month span, but ranged from 55 hours a week to 93 for one week. Of course not 100% of the time was spent on actual work but it was pretty close. The 93 hour w…

well add in the 4 hour a day commute and that's actually 70 hours lol.

Re: People Who Claim to Work 75-Hour Weeks Usually Only Work About 50 Hours

#139
I worked 60-70 hours a week for 6 months and destroyed by health (actually programming for 50+ of those hours, tracked time since it was billable hours for a consulting firm). Finished the project by the deadline I was hired for, but quit soon afterwards and within 2 months I was in the ICU, and then in and out of the hospital several times with some serious chronic health issues that I'm still recovering from 2 years later. I made a lot of money but spent the next year barely working and recovering my health. Doctor's weren't 100% sure it was stress/work related("possible" it contributed), but I was pretty sure. All things considered, it was a losing option despite the pay. I could have done it at age 25 but not at age 45.

Now I work 40-50 hours and week, make even more money(for where I live, average by SV standards), but it's still a high pressure job. I'd gladly work 25 hours a week for 1/3 the pay.

Why isn't there someone disrupting software development paying experienced people like me a low salary for 20-30 hours a week? I'd still get over half as much done as I do working 50 hours a week, I'm sure.

Re: People Who Claim to Work 75-Hour Weeks Usually Only Work About 50 Hours

#140

I worked 60-70 hours a week for 6 months and destroyed by health ( actually programming for 50+ of those hours, tracked time since it was billable hours for a consulting firm). Finished the project by the deadline I was hired for, but quit soon afterwards and within 2 months I was in the ICU, and then in and out of the hospital several times with some serious chronic health issues that I'm still recovering from 2 yea…

Communication overhead is a major limitation when growing team sizes.
Post reply on HN