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How Some Consultants Fake an 80-Hour Workweek (2015)

nytimes.com

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Re: How Some Consultants Fake an 80-Hour Workweek (2015)

#31

Post by rustcharm »

withinrafael wrote: post #21
ousta wrote: post #6

men and women. parity folks. dont be so misogynist

The study included women and results differed between the two. Misogyny is not in play here. "A second finding is that women, particularly those with young children, were much more likely to request greater flexibility through more formal means, such as returning from maternity leave with an explicitly reduced schedule. Men who requested a paternity leave seemed to be punished come review time, and so may have felt m…

It's "misandry" not "misogyny". A hatred of men.

Re: How Some Consultants Fake an 80-Hour Workweek (2015)

#32

Post by raverbashing »

In the same spirit of "play stupid games, win stupid prizes", I'll describe this as "making stupid demands is asking to be deceived"

" For people who were good at faking it, there was no real damage done by their lighter workloads."

Well, duh. The customer is the limiting factor in a lot of cases and downtime means you get to focus more on the work (when you're actually working)

Re: How Some Consultants Fake an 80-Hour Workweek (2015)

#33

Post by rustcharm »

withinrafael wrote: post #21
ousta wrote: post #6

men and women. parity folks. dont be so misogynist

The study included women and results differed between the two. Misogyny is not in play here. "A second finding is that women, particularly those with young children, were much more likely to request greater flexibility through more formal means, such as returning from maternity leave with an explicitly reduced schedule. Men who requested a paternity leave seemed to be punished come review time, and so may have felt m…

Hacker News edits the facts, and even titles, to suit their agenda. Sad.

Re: How Some Consultants Fake an 80-Hour Workweek (2015)

#34

Post by tetha »

I think one important takeaway is also: A good, motivated team will make it work. For example we need to cover 0800 - 1800 due to SLAs, but usually we have 2 guys just organizing Kita (kindergarten) duty with their wifes. One brings his kids to the Kita in the morning and comes in at around 0900, and the other guy comes in early and leaves at 1700ish to collect the kids. Simple.

We also had this when our application just went into a royal meltdown earlier this year and we had pretty much constant OOH work to do. Eventually we arranged that I don't come into the office for a week or more, and I'll just work reduced night hours. This allowed us to tackle that mayhem much more effectively - they'd figure out issues and create patches and manual tasks. I'd apply them overnight, and hand them everything that caught on fire this time. I don't like to work at night, but I'm the guy without ties and who's gonna complain about 20 - 25 hour weeks?

Re: How Some Consultants Fake an 80-Hour Workweek (2015)

#35

Post by georgewsinger »

"You shouldn't work long hours" is consensus advice masquerading as contrarian advice. You can see this for two reasons: (i) count the number of people in threads like this who advise against working long hours; (ii) go to Amazon.com and count the number of books that advocate (often using empirical evidence) against working long hours. The same is true for "you shouldn't multitask". Everyone thinks they're clever for saying this. But in fact it's just consensus advice (and of course: there are good reasons to think it).

The question then is: under what conditions is the consensus opinion wrong? Why do notable outliers (i.e., people like Elon Musk) do the opposite of consensus and perform so well (Elon in particular not only consistently works 80+ hour weeks, but seems to multitask quite a bit)?

The interesting data points are always the outliers, not the averages.

Re: How Some Consultants Fake an 80-Hour Workweek (2015)

#36

Post by 01100011 »

galvarez800 wrote: post #2

This makes perfect sense to me. From what I've seen anecdotally, it seems most people can work 80-hour weeks at full productivity for maybe one or two weeks, tops. After that, the fatigue starts to set in and that person's performance starts to decline. In the long run, the person working 80 hour weeks isn't getting much more done than someone working far fewer hours, simply because during those 80 hours they are ope…

Depends. There was a time in my 30s(IIRC) where I had 3 contracts going at the same time. It was exhilarating. My mind was constantly humming and I was really into it. I was pulling about 80 hours a week for a few months. It really depends on the type of work and how much it engages you.

Re: How Some Consultants Fake an 80-Hour Workweek (2015)

#37

Post by blhack »

Can some of you chime in with your experience here re: consulting and hours.

None of the consultants I know of would estimate a time requirement (other than something incredibly loose) for any kind of job bigger than a few hours. The MO seems to be some version of:

"You give me [the consulting firm] a maximum per week that you can afford on this, and we will have a weekly stand up where we talk about what was completed, what will be completed by next week, and how we can allocate resources to accomplish these things."

To me this seems like an incredibly good way of managing this relationship. However, plenty of people I talk to on the other side (trying to hire consultants) insist that they need a full bid of how much time a project will take.

I almost always tell these people that I can't really give them that answer, and that I also to be wary of anybody who actually responds to this question.

Am I the strange one here?

I almost wonder if this is the source of the overage that is being talked about in this article. They're quoting them $foo hours per week, when in reality it will take $foo/4. So when they get the work and finish it at $foo/2, they don't lose money.

That seems really dishonest to me.

Re: How Some Consultants Fake an 80-Hour Workweek (2015)

#38

Post by leroy_masochist »

spiderfarmer wrote: post #23

You Americans are messing eachother up with your workaholic culture. Relax folks, there’s much more to life.

The tens of thousands of highly educated Europeans who voluntarily work in stressful finance jobs in New York provide an interesting counterpoint to your argument.

Re: How Some Consultants Fake an 80-Hour Workweek (2015)

#39

Post by danieltillett »

galvarez800 wrote: post #2

This makes perfect sense to me. From what I've seen anecdotally, it seems most people can work 80-hour weeks at full productivity for maybe one or two weeks, tops. After that, the fatigue starts to set in and that person's performance starts to decline. In the long run, the person working 80 hour weeks isn't getting much more done than someone working far fewer hours, simply because during those 80 hours they are ope…

Having worked longer than 80 hour weeks for years at a time at full productivity I know it is possible for at least some people. The issue for me was not one of fatigue, but of a slow corruption of my perception of reality. The longer I worked at this pace the worse my ability to differentiate important from unimportant became and I made some very "interesting" decisions during that time.

I still work more 40 hours a week, but nowhere near the level I did in the past.

Re: How Some Consultants Fake an 80-Hour Workweek (2015)

#40

Post by semi-extrinsic »

georgewsinger wrote: post #35

"You shouldn't work long hours" is consensus advice masquerading as contrarian advice. You can see this for two reasons: (i) count the number of people in threads like this who advise against working long hours; (ii) go to Amazon.com and count the number of books that advocate (often using empirical evidence) against working long hours. The same is true for "you shouldn't multitask". Everyone thinks they're clever fo…

Do we even have well-documented cases of these outliers? Are any unbiased outsiders allowed to watch what e.g. Musk does in his 80-hour week? How do we know it's not 40 hours of hard work interleaved with 40 hours of "working" meals, travelling and other low-productivity time?
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