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Shopify CEO says long hours aren't necessary for success

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

#141

Post by Enginerrrd »

rifung wrote: post #46
zarkov99 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is anecdotal information that he does indeed do what he claims. And he is the most impressive CEO in this generation, perhaps in history, so long hours must work for some people.

> And he is the most impressive CEO in this generation, perhaps in history, so long hours must work for some people. Even if we assume the first statement is true, which is a big if, it still doesn't necessarily support the idea that working long hours is good. After all, you can't tell whether he was successful because of, or despite the long hours.

I think there's something to be said for the nature of the work you are doing. If you absolutely love what you're doing, you can burn hours long and fast and hard. I think Elon gets his head wrapped around a problem and just eats lives and breathes that problem to the point that the long hours are natural. I've been there on stuff, where I have to fight to tear myself away rather than fighting to keep myself doing it. The latter sucks and will destroy you quickly, but the former isn't so bad for the psyche.

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

#142

Post by GVIrish »

hintymad wrote: post #106

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…

The whole argument is not about temporary spikes in hours to meet a goal, it's about the wrong-headed idea that one should be working 60-80+ hours on a long term basis.

Some of the proponents of long term overwork argue that it is a requirement for big successes in entrepreneurship or that people must be willing to burn themselves out to 'change the world' or other such nonsense.

Working long hours on a short term basis is not evil, but there are quite a few organizations exploiting their employees in a chase for big exits that those employees will never benefit from.

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

#143

Post by nik736 »

bwb wrote: post #28

I don't believe anyone really does 80 hours. I just don't think it is possible and I don't think you can call sitting at a desk doing nothing "work". I've done 60 hours during intense periods just fine... but it was only effective because of the nature of the work I was doing at the time. And, I usually took a break down the road to compensate. In no way was it even 50% creative work. 4 to 6 creative hours seems righ…

I can tell you that I worked 80 hours a week for several months and while it is not effective, it was "necessary" for the business to survive. I had 4-6 hours per day that were really effective (if even), the others were just there to get simple stuff done, which was necessary to meet deadlines.

Would I do it again? Absolutely not, because it is simply bad management. But I can imagine how easy it is to get stuck in such a work environment. Or people might think "when it is working once, it will work all the time". The truth is that if the deadlines and work would have been planned better it would easily be achievable in 40 hours.

The problem is that some startups are super chaotic, overpromise, underdeliver without even thinking about how long something takes.

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

#144

Post by mlthoughts2018 »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #91
mindblownlazy wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep seeing this but why do non-creatives count dinner, commuting and exercise as work? (You don't do all these but you put dinner there) As a creative I find it hard to justify that, sure I did talk about work during lunch with a coworker or an ex coworker or friend but damn I was just enjoying my pork chops, that's not work!!!

I don't count dinner as work, that was just my whole schedule.

Do you feel as a society that we should condone working beyond dinner like like?

As I read your schedule, I think, “if this couldn’t be handled between 9-5, with a no-work break for lunch, then something is wrong here and effective decisions aren’t being made.”

I say this as someone with a similar job, the machine learning manager with several teams reporting to me, budgets in the tens of millions per year, staffing decisions, executive meetings, procurement, etc. in a large global ecommerce company, with a similar large scale mission about data driven decision making.

If myself or any of the managers or teams reporting in to me has to work past dinner or _ever_ has to work (even just looking at Slack) on weekends, that’s a massive, critical failure on my part.

Unless we make it a critical company mission level priority, this type of healthy work/life balance culture won’t happen. It has to come down from leaders through example first, especially simply stopping work after about 8 hours that fit in with the diversity of personal life needs reflected by the overall staff (not just preferences of people who don’t mind working late or have fewer obligations preventing it).

I actually think one of the most critical signs of an effective leader is _not_ working, electing to let certain work take longer than it otherwise could — and defending that decision to executives — as part of maturity in establishing a healthy culture.

Working more hours is like taking the lazy way out in some regards. It’s much harder work to build healthy patterns over time. It’s kind of similar to developing the senior engineering skill / discipline to avoid unnecessary refactoring and avoid cluttering up a set of changes with superfluous extra fixes. It takes more discipline to hold back and do it the right way.

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

#145

Post by ClumsyPilot »

parthdesai wrote: post #107
natalyarostova wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think it's fair to suggest he was slacking or something, unless you can show that the norm is to accomplish same job far faster.

Perhaps it would be fair to say, it is easier/more natural to spend 12 hours in a day dealing with people that moving bags of coal or solving differential equations.

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

#147

Post by ClumsyPilot »

jcims wrote: post #98
mindblownlazy wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep seeing this but why do non-creatives count dinner, commuting and exercise as work? (You don't do all these but you put dinner there) As a creative I find it hard to justify that, sure I did talk about work during lunch with a coworker or an ex coworker or friend but damn I was just enjoying my pork chops, that's not work!!!

Why do we culturally accept the distinction 'creatives' and 'non-creatives'. It's gross.

People like putting themselves in boxes, and the one he used is generally accepted classification. I don't think it's something to be offended about.

I think Tech community is quite elitist at times

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

#148

Post by GVIrish »

bertr4nd wrote: post #109

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…

10% more in raw hours is just 44 hours a week. This whole issue is not about companies with 40 hr work weeks versus companies with 44 hour with weeks. It's about environments where 60, 70, 80+ hours a weeks is the norm.

I think the argument can be made for doing a bit extra regularly to improve and grow. But that's not what is happening in this ridiculous hustle culture where people are burning 60-80+ hours week all year round in an effort to win the rat race by running people into the ground.

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

#149

Post by bradj »

mindblownlazy wrote: post #90
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of my work weeks clock in around 50-60 hours regularly. It's pretty simple how this happens. It's meetings all day and then once meetings are over it's email, documents, admin paperwork, training etc... Here's an example of just last Thursday which was busy but was at least not double booked and had some times I could stop and go to the bathroom, I also wasn't traveling this day which was good: 8-12 - US Senate…

I keep seeing this but why do non-creatives count dinner, commuting and exercise as work? (You don't do all these but you put dinner there) As a creative I find it hard to justify that, sure I did talk about work during lunch with a coworker or an ex coworker or friend but damn I was just enjoying my pork chops, that's not work!!!

Dinner is often literally work when you are meeting with clients, partners, employees, etc.

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

#150

Post by GVIrish »

nif2ee wrote: post #128

let's see what happens if he starts today all over again. He forgot to mention the most important thing, that he was at the right place and right time. No matter how you come up with a 1000x better Shopify today, you most probably won't go anywhere. Many clunky business projects that were started with the rise of social media (around 2004-2013) made their owners kings ONLY because they were at the right place and tim…

I don't think that argument holds at all. The low hanging fruit from 10 years ago has been picked. But in a lot of ways we only see it as low hanging fruit in hindsight. Today there are new business opportunities that in 10 years will seem like they were low hanging fruit. There are new technologies today that will enable new businesses that wouldn't have been feasible before.

Even then, there are only going to be but so many companies that get to the kind of scale of Shopify and that was true 15 years ago, and it's true today. But there is plenty of room for new small and medium sized companies to make millions of dollars. Success doesn't always have to be at the 3 comma level.

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