Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 103 posts

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

#81

Post by rohitb91 »

da02 wrote: post #53
gringoDan wrote: post #5

I'm convinced that most of the long hours of corporate America can be explained as a form of signaling. This is just more evidence that there are a whole lot of bullshit jobs out there. [0] Anecdotally, when I worked as an investment banking analyst, there was hardly anything to do from 9-5, then 6-8 hours of work was dumped on my desk at 5pm. Half of that work was un-doing changes I made the day before because the V…

Was this the reason or part of the reason you left being an investment banking analyst? What's the educational requirements/qualifications to for an investment banking analyst?

Not OP but to get in generally go to an ivy league school, or go to a non target with an amazing GPA, ECs and luck, or have connections.

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

#82

Post by Aeolun »

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…

Is it wrong? Or is Musk just still ‘succeeding’ despite his 80 hour workweeks?

Either way, if he built even slightly decent companies, what Musk does should have very little effect on their trajectory unless he wants it to.

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

#83

Post by chris_mc »

Aeolun wrote: post #79
chris_mc wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't think that's true, watchstanding positions are amongst the most mind numbing jobs that actually require your full attention. I stood watch in the Navy as officer of the deck in port, and I can truly say that 6 hour shift was torture for the mind, much worse than coding 6 hours.

To a point I guess, but I imagine the drop off in performance from 2 hours to 8 hours of standing watch is much larger than the one from 8 to 20 hours.

From 8 to 20 hours watchstanding, you're basically not watchstanding. It went like this:

    Hour 1: Fine

    Hour 2: Walk around a bit, then fine

    Hour 3-5: Jesus, I never should have joined the Navy

    Hour 6: I want to pull out my 9mm and use it on myself

    Hours past 6: I am functionally useless
Some jobs that aren't knowledge-jobs are hard on your mind, too. The reason security/watchstanding is so hard is that you have to be alert at all times while doing, effectively, jack squat. It isn't a much different level of alertness than I am in while programming, now that I think about it carefully.

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

#84

Post by ryanwaggoner »

joezydeco wrote: post #65
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. =)

These rules of thumb are humorous, but they indicate an appalling lack of ability to both estimate and manage a project.

I've been a self-employed software engineer for more than a decade and I've worked on 100+ projects. Very few of them got done on the original timeline, but none of them were overdue to anything close to this degree.

If I tell a client it'll take 3 weeks and it takes 6 months, there will be a mountain of shit raining down on me (and them), starting with them never working with me again, and possibly ending with them refusing to pay at all or legal action.

Not to mention that you'll never win the project in the first place if you start quoting your estimates this way: "Hmm, that $4,000 site that I think will take 20 hours at $200 / hr to build? I'll just quote it at $64,000 to be on the safe side."

(Note: just an example, you shouldn't price projects this way anyway)

These naive rules of thumb are always so arbitrary too. Why bother with the doubling and changing of units, just multiply by 1000 and call it a day.

A much better rule of thumb is 1.5x to 3x, depending on how conservative and experienced you are, how many risk factors the project has, how much you'll be depending on the client, etc.

Software is really hard to estimate properly, and cost and timeline overruns are a fact of life. But if you regularly find yourself 10x overdue, you should probably revisit the way you're doing this.

Major IT projects are almost double over on timeline on average, but not 8-10x: https://www.economist.com/business/2005/06/09/overdue-and-ov...

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

#85

Post by kaikau »

Letmesleep69 wrote: post #77
kaikau wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wake up and work until I go to sleep. Every day. 8 hours of sleep, either in one chunk or in two (biphasic). I feel better with biphasic. So that leaves 13 hours each day after subtracting eating time, housekeeping, bathroom "tasks", reddit/HN, and falling asleep transition time. 91 hours per week. Been living like this for years without burnout, although I think at 100-130 hours one is asking for trouble.

Can I ask why? I did similar hours for a while but I couldn't date or see friends or exercise and even sit done and read a book for long. If I was forced to do that often I would have quit. Its not like its hard to get another job as a developer. When working 80 hours or more you're basically doing the work of two developers and the company should really just hire another IMO.

The startup is my baby and I'm solo. I don't just develop, I design, market, handle investor relations, etc. I wouldn't do this if it wasn't this specific situation.

Edit: Haven't had a girlfriend or dated or regularly socialized with friends in years, but I don't feel bad about it. Most of my friends who I respect the most are just as busy as I am pursuing their goals in music and neuroscience. :)

Edit2: I do hire additional devs when I can afford it, but that doesn't have an effect on my hours.

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

#86

Post by aptwebapps »

sheepmullet wrote: post #68
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.

If you have slow patches, you're slow. If you have fast patches, the work must have been easy, right?

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

#87

Post by swingline-747 »

gringoDan wrote: post #5

I'm convinced that most of the long hours of corporate America can be explained as a form of signaling. This is just more evidence that there are a whole lot of bullshit jobs out there. [0] Anecdotally, when I worked as an investment banking analyst, there was hardly anything to do from 9-5, then 6-8 hours of work was dumped on my desk at 5pm. Half of that work was un-doing changes I made the day before because the V…

Virtue signaling... while accomplishing little-to-nothing.

Fire the Workaholics IIRC was a 37signals blog article that brings some sanity to unreasonable, unproductive patterns.

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

#88

Post by swingline-747 »

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…

I would wager fewer hours coding and more doing exercise, yoga, meditation, getting massages, sauna, etc. would lead to greater productivity per calendar unit time.

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

#89

Post by dang »

rustcharm wrote: post #33
withinrafael wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't know how to edit facts, but we edit titles to suit the agenda of having neutral titles. The article's title was obviously baiting people into yet another gender flamewar.

This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

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

#90

Post by dang »

rustcharm wrote: post #28

Original title is: "How Some Men Fake an 80-Hour Workweek, and Why It Matters" and the author makes a Big Deal over this being a "man" thing. Why do the people at "hacker news" want to gloss over the sexism behind the author's shaky premise? Normally an inflammatory article like this would be [flagged] and the submitter shadowbanned.

Because it was an interesting article. When there's an interesting article with a baity title, we ask submitters to de-bait the title, or (failing that) do it ourselves. This is in the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Post reply on HN