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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)

#61

Post by vkou »

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…

> 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)?

From all outwards appearances, Elon Musk may be on the verge of a nervous breakdown. His public behaviour is becoming increasingly irrational, erratic, and likely counterproductive to his businesses. (TSLA private at $420, boring questions, pedoguy, etc.)

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

#62

Post by Denzel »

blhack wrote: post #37

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 complet…

Here's the deal, you need to use both: (1) a bottom-up Agile, and (2) a top-down estimation approach.

You need to do them at different times and for different reasons. The top-down estimation at the start of a project needs to be done to the lowest level of detail necessary to get a Go/No-Go decision made. You can't realistically start an Agile-managed project without understanding where $10k is in the ballpark of $10M. That's just foolish. This top-down estimation needs to be done to the level-of-detail and accuracy required by your Go/No-Go decision.

Then, on a day-over-day basis, you use Agile to manage the actual project operating process. (I'm speaking loosely here, of course, as long as Agile makes sense.) This allows you to be dynamic week-over-week and respond to outside forces, new information, new technology, etc., within your budget.

What people miss is that no sensible project sponsor is going to accept, "we'll finish it when we finish it for however much it costs" unless it's pure research. And if I only need accuracy to the closest $10M, then we can keep the estimates high-level, if I need it to the closest $10k, then we need lower level estimates. It's just the nature of it. As a project sponsor, I need to know what's possible.

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

#63

Post by borroka »

leroy_masochist wrote: post #38
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.

Because it is difficult to get those challenging jobs in Europe and you are getting paid much more in the US. Plus, a certain "capitalism-envy" of the European.

I agree with the point about the weird American workaholism and the very peculiar boring personalities, low worldliness, and loneliness of the highly paid American professional.

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

#64

Post by WaxProlix »

baddox wrote: post #30
thrower123 wrote: post #16

Well, duh. I can't even work a full 40 hour week as a programmer without being completely braindead. I think the dirty secret is that as long as you hit the meetings you're supposed to be at, and show your face at strategically useful times, nobody cares the slightest whether you are actually there or not - as long as the work gets done. > The result of this is easy to see: Those specifically requesting a lighter wor…

> nobody cares the slightest whether you are actually there or not - as long as the work gets done. That only works if the people with authority have the desire and ability to determine whether the work is being done. When they don’t, easy metrics like working hours unfortunately are what they care about.

Even easier because then you don't have to do the work; just make extra sure that you've put in the face time to the right moments.

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

#65

Post by joezydeco »

foxfired wrote: post #29

When I was hired as a consultant, the very first day I was asked to give an estimate on how long it will take me to complete the project. (Coincidentally, it was for a New York Times) I spent my time studying the code base and the requirement. By the end of the day, I told them around ~20 hours. It was a fairly easy project. I spent a month and a half to complete the project. What I didn't take into account was how l…

The old rule of thumb is "take the estimate, double the number, and increase the units by one."

1 day = 2 weeks

20 hours = 40 days

1 month = 2 quarters

1 year = 2 decades. =)

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

#66

Post by JamesBarney »

cma wrote: post #4
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 if they are engaged or not and how taxing it is. People can play MMOs or MOBAs way past 40hr/week and they don't all have a huge performance dropoff. They are probably more prone to RSI and stuff at more hours though. I wouldn't be surprised to see a productive 100hr week in some kind of MMO player.

I think the OP is talking about knowledge workers specifically. If you're a security guard, I think it's obvious you could do your job for 100 hrs with very little drop off in performance.

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

#67

Post by Balgair »

There is also the opposite idea: ghosting hours. Where you are actually working 80 hours, but billing 40. I've had meetings where the bosses of the consulting firm state that the more junior consultants much be in before the client, must leave after the client, and much not ghost hours at all. When they say these things, they really mean that you must ghost hours. A lot of consulting is learning to read between the lines.

A great show on the topic is House of Lies. Though most consultants won't claim to have seen everything in the show, they have seen about half.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Lies

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

#68

Post by sheepmullet »

tptacek wrote: post #20

A friend of mine used to check all his code into a private CVS repository and then trickle his commits out into the official company repository over the course of a week.

I still do this because I don’t have very consistent productivity.

Some sprints I will get 3-4 sprints worth of work done whereas in others I won’t be able to complete my work.

Since I started smoothing out my performance I have gone from being seen as a decent dev to a 10x dev.

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

#69

Post by sheepmullet »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #40
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?

> other low-productivity time?

How would you even measure low productivity time for someone like Musk who has incredible leverage?

For example I was chatting with a friebd about his companies product and it sounds awesome.

Yet for me this was a “low value” conversation as I know I couldnt get my workplace to purchase it.

Musk on the other hand can delegate the evaluation and if it’s a good fit his company will buy it.

So for Musk the same conversation could be very high productivity.

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

#70

Post by [deleted] »

01100011 wrote: post #36
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.

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