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Watch a VC use my name to sell a con

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Re: Watch a VC use my name to sell a con

#201

Post by stevejalim »

regularfry wrote: post #194
nik_0_0 wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the human body isn't built for sitting 8 hours a day, I'm damn sure its not made for standing 8 hours a day (not mine at least!)

It's not made for being immobile. With a standing desk, I find I move around more.

Agreed. It's not simply a question of standing over sitting; it's about moving.

I have a motorised desk (essentially the GeekDesk v2) and shift two or three times a day from sitting to standing to standing while leaning on a sitting stool (which you can do even if you don't have a robo-desk). Plus I move around frequently (kitchen, bathroom, fetch water, etc) and - don't knock it till you've tried it - have a dartboard for when I'm taking screen breaks.

Re: Watch a VC use my name to sell a con

#202

Post by JGailor »

biafra wrote: post #152
9oliYQjP wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've not seen eye to eye with PG on everything he has written. But this particular essay is one of my favourites of his. PG laid out an upper bound, which he later clarifies: "If $3 million a year seems high, remember that we're talking about the limit case: the case where you not only have zero leisure time but indeed work so hard that you endanger your health." And his upper limit for hours worked was 2x that of a…

Its only 11.43 hours a day if you work on weekends. I am not advocating this! I think if you are passionate about your work and work 8 hours a day (5 days a week) at full capacity you are productive enough. I can work more for one or two weeks if necessary (with the adrenalin boost stemming from a near by deadline) but not for much longer.

This is a great point that is often overlooked in the startup work environment. In 8 years of working at Startups I have only ever been in one place where anyone actually worked a solid 8 hours (everyone happened to pair-program there, which was one of the biggest contributors to this IMO). In most places people spend somewhere between 25-50% of their time surfing the web, reading personal email, hanging out in IRC rooms, socializing, etc. At this particular startup we really did none of that during the day. We all just felt really strongly about what we were working on, as a team we worked with the business guys to set a strong direction for the near-short term, and for four hours in the morning and four in the afternoon we worked. That was it. At 6 pm we left basically feeling punch-drunk for the mental exhaustion, and we went and followed our respective personal pursuits. The result?

The first place I'd worked where we launched on schedule with no overtime worked, with all of the features that business wanted for the big 1.0 (well, web-app 1.0... Really just a euphemism here).

My point is that while Arrington goes on about working insane hours, everyone always seems to overlook how much time in the office isn't actually productive for the product. I've been at places where people "worked" 16 hour days, at least 6 of which were spent playing Starcraft LAN games.

Re: Watch a VC use my name to sell a con

#203

Post by myspy »

kristofferR wrote: post #181
antirez wrote: post #168

Humans are not designed to: 1) Stay long hours sitted, immobile. It ruins your health. 2) To provide a steady high quality output in creative disciplines (writing code qualifies) for more than a 4/5 hours a day (add to this the time to do breaks, install your updates, check news sites, fix the email client, and you'll reach the 7/8 hours per day figure). It makes sense in a startup to work hard in crucial weeks, you…

This may be slightly off topic, but for solving #1 a standing desk is a great idea. My energy levels have improved dramatically and I've also lost some weight since I got my standing desk.

Ars Technica had an headline that standing desks are not as good as many think, but I didn't read it. Nevertheless, work to live, don't live to work.

Re: Watch a VC use my name to sell a con

#204

Post by interlagos »

mjijackson wrote: post #130
felipemnoa wrote: post #8

>>Follow the fucking money. When a VC tells you what's good for you, check your wallet, then count your fingers. This is just gold.

Been thinking a lot about this statement, but still not sure exactly what he means by it. I could interpret it a few different ways, and I'm probably over-thinking it. How do you interpret this?

It means that people pushing advice usually do so primarily for their own good. This is a universal truth that applies to many situations.

Re: Watch a VC use my name to sell a con

#205

Post by brain5ide »

gizzlon wrote: post #144
itmag wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see it as an experiment in thinking about leverage. If you minimized all the corporate office bullshit, leveraged your work to the max, AND worked hard on top of that, how much could you earn? The baseline becomes your work earnings WITH corp-bullshit, poor leverage, and lackluster effort, and then he extrapolates from that. Leverage analogy: think schwerpunkt in blitzkrieg. If you amass all your tanks on one secto…

hm.. and I guess, if you're running in the wrong direction, you'll get there faster.. not sure if that's good or bad

Somewhere in here lies a differential equation that includes the probability of destination being the right one and distance to it to evaluate that.

Re: Watch a VC use my name to sell a con

#206

Post by SonicSoul »

someone13 wrote: post #6

Some people may not enjoy the green-on-black text, so this might be of use: http://www.readability.com/articles/dirqhjff

i've been using Gleebox for chrome and Firefox to get readibility links for any article.

just type "g !read"

and it saves history so next time it's just "g !" !

Re: Watch a VC use my name to sell a con

#207

Post by jes5199 »

nostrademons wrote: post #116
larrys wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Almost every industry out there manages to make good profits without their employees having to give up their lives." Medicine and law being two exceptions.

Note the pattern: medicine, law, and engineering are 3 industries where the employees carry significant human capital with them (finance is another one, and i-bankers also give up their lives). I suspect the reason for this is because human capital makes the payoff for additional hours worked non-linear. One cashier working 80 hours a week should be just about as productive as two cashiers working 40 hours a week (a…

> However, one engineer working 80 hours a week is significantly more productive than two engineers working 40 hours a week

Disagree! An engineer working 80 hours a week will make worse decisions, understand things more slowly, get more confused by bugs, and make poorer decisions overall. The net productivity will be lower. Some of the best programmers I know turn into terrible programmers after one long day. If you make that long day Friday, you might be able to squeeze 45 high-quality hours out of them in a week.

Re: Watch a VC use my name to sell a con

#208

Post by dlikhten »

While reading this post I was thinking of a few funny things about life and money:

Money makes money. An example is Kim Kardasian. What does she produce? Nothing. Does she actually make anything better than others? No. She has money. Using that money she was able to be part of a TV show, which she used as an oportunity to make herself a character people liked, used that to up-sell whatever crap she made, used that to make shittons of cash on her wedding.

How is that relevant?

Well, same happens here. If you have money, you can invest, money that is much needed for business to get off the ground. Now you may argue that "don't get investment money, start small, then make a bigger business when you can affort it" which is actually quite valid. However if that is not what you want then you are basically asking people for money. They made the money, and are reaping the benefits of that money.

So basically you get rich, they get rich. You did the work though. However once you get rich, you can now make the bigger business that you wanted to, this time bootstrapped.

Re: Watch a VC use my name to sell a con

#209

Post by rapind »

antirez wrote: post #168

Humans are not designed to: 1) Stay long hours sitted, immobile. It ruins your health. 2) To provide a steady high quality output in creative disciplines (writing code qualifies) for more than a 4/5 hours a day (add to this the time to do breaks, install your updates, check news sites, fix the email client, and you'll reach the 7/8 hours per day figure). It makes sense in a startup to work hard in crucial weeks, you…

I respect your opinion Antirez, but I hear so much speculation about work habits that I have to ask you: Is this your opinion / experience, or is it based on some specific research / study you can point to?

As a fellow developer I'd love this to be true, however a meme / fad started during my working career in rich cultures stating that hard work isn't rewarding or is unnecessary. I question this.

My father taught me to work hard, as his father taught him, etc, and this basically states that my father was being scammed. Doesn't every generation at some point rebel against the previous generation's beliefs? Could it be that the whole work less theme (apparently based on science?) is simply rebellion?

All I know is that I plan to teach my kids that working hard for something is itself a reward. That you can't appreciate anything you didn't work for, and the harder you work for it, the more you appreciate it. I also expect this will help them survive in a hyper competitive global workplace.

Maybe if we consider maintaining physical fitness to be part of our daily work, then I'd be on board with these thoughts. I.e. 4-5 hours at a desk being creative, and 3+ hours of some sort of physical exertion.

Re: Watch a VC use my name to sell a con

#210

Post by antirez »

rapind wrote: post #209
antirez wrote: post #168

Humans are not designed to: 1) Stay long hours sitted, immobile. It ruins your health. 2) To provide a steady high quality output in creative disciplines (writing code qualifies) for more than a 4/5 hours a day (add to this the time to do breaks, install your updates, check news sites, fix the email client, and you'll reach the 7/8 hours per day figure). It makes sense in a startup to work hard in crucial weeks, you…

I respect your opinion Antirez, but I hear so much speculation about work habits that I have to ask you: Is this your opinion / experience, or is it based on some specific research / study you can point to? As a fellow developer I'd love this to be true, however a meme / fad started during my working career in rich cultures stating that hard work isn't rewarding or is unnecessary. I question this. My father taught me…

This is my opinion and is based solely on my experience after 15 years of being in the industry, including one successful startup built by me and a friend of mine with a decent "exit" sold to Telecom Italia, and a successful open source software (Redis). Additionally I used to work in different places in the past with many programmers, so what I say is also based on how the success of programmers I know first hand correlates with the amount of work they do.

I also follow two companies here in Sicily that I built in the past, one has six programmers.

So all the above is my "data source", that is not statistically significant.

I don't really think a programmer working 8 hours is going to be less successful of one working 12 hours per day: it is either good enough to be outstanding with the 8 hours, or will fail even with the 12 hours, since the productivity gained by experience, skills, understanding of the problem is the kind of 10x or 100x gain, while from 8 to 12 hours the difference is little (and, again, not sustainable for long time IMHO).

Startups are built by programmers, so I think the same applies to them as well, mostly.

In other words I could say that the output of a programmer correlates more strongly with the work it did to learn writing code, than the work it does writing actual code.

Another important thing is that having fun is not lost time if you want to build a startup. Recently startups are a lot more about providing an "experience" to the user, and enriching yourself in your free time can be very useful to provide something that people want.

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