That's very succinct, witty, and more or less diametrically opposed to the point of the OP on StackOverflow. Did you read it? :-)
He's making the point that regular long hours are always a sign of bad management.
I'd tend to agree. Any business can be run in balance with a reasonable lifestyle. If you're working overtime very often on your own business, it's either because you're incompetent, or lazy, or greedy, or failing (see 'incompetent'). If you're working regular long hours on someone else's business, it's because they are incompetent/lazy/greedy.
"If you're working overtime very often on your own business, it's either because you're incompetent, or lazy, or greedy, or failing (see 'incompetent')."
Of all of the successful people I've met (measured in cash, influence, etc), I can't think of ANY who weren't pretty seriously married to their work. I guess many of those people fall into the "greedy" camp and are doing it for the money. But I think most of them do it because they love (or are just addicted to) the game they are playing.
Whoever you're competing with, you've probably got competitors smarter than you and willing to put in long hours. If you're playing to win (many people do, for a lot of reasons), how do you propose to beat them?
To anticipate a common argument: Yes, working hard can lead to stress/bad decisions/burnout. But empirically, it seems to correlate pretty strongly with success.
I think that's a myth of the startup world (a persistent, but mostly incorrect myth). I know successful people with both balanced and unbalanced lives... and the former are definitely happier.
I'm not convinced that regular long hours lead to a more competitive business. Particularly when it comes to running a business (as opposed to being a contractor or freelancer, which is a completely different proposition), spending 1 hour sitting outside and having a great idea that saves you a day of work is much more valuable than spending 16 hours getting it done the stupid way.
Generally, I haven't seen a great correlation between working long hours and working smart - but I have seen a good correlation between working smart and being successful.
Another anecdotal bit of evidence: generally, most of the successful workaholics I've met tend to be in the corporate world, where they often don't have the choice of working smart.
I've been both of those people. I spent 5 years working every waking minute of the day; even if I wasn't at my computer, I was thinking about what had to be done next and constantly anxious to get back to it. I ruined several relationships and generally had a piss-poor life because of it.
Now, though, I work my ass off at my day job, I spend a couple hours a night and the weekends working on my startup, and I spend as much time as I possibly can with my girlfriend. I'm a much happier person, and I'm still making tons of progress in life in general.
That's a bit of a straw man. You don't have to choose between working harder or smarter. And I never said anything about happiness.
Say we fork the universe now and one version of you works 25 hour weeks henceforth, which the other works 50 hours per week henceforth. Who retires with more money and more impact on the world? Both version of you are equally smart. The well-rested you might make SLIGHTLY smarter decisions due to happiness/lack of fatigue perhaps... But surely you wouldn't contend that the success outcomes (professional impact and wealth, for the sake of argument) wouldn't be different.
It's not a myth-- working hard correlates with success (plenty of studies out there to back it up). Working smart correlates with success too... Though one of the things that really surprised me about being in Y Combinator was that the founders WEREN'T universally brilliant/clever. They DID universally work their asses off and generally had irrational stick-with-it-ness.
Happiness is a whole different discussion, of course. Whether "top 1%" success is even worth it is another discussion.
It's my understanding that when people say "working hard" in these discussions, they aren't comparing 25 hrs/week vs. 50 hrs/week. They're usually comparing 50 hrs/week vs. 75 hrs/week.
If I forked my life into a version of me that worked 50 hour work weeks and one that worked 75 hour work weeks, the 50-hour me would win, hands down. The 75 hour work week me would outright miss most of the key strategic decisions that got me where I am. When I look at everything I've done that in hindsight has been a huge career boost - getting involved in the Harry Potter fandom, making friends on the C2 Wiki that got me a job in financial software, learning Lisp & functional programming, founding a startup, and getting a job at Google - they all happened in the downtime between work. Had I simply worked 75 hour work weeks since 2001, I would be a physics grad student right now, hating it, and making a pittance. I'd probably be a damned good physics grad student, but that doesn't help me very much.
Now, I also put in quite a few hours into developing skills and building a track record, and I don't think those opportunities would've opened up if I hadn't. But I wouldn't have thought to look for the opportunities if I did nothing but concentrate on work. You're a big fan of necessary but not sufficient conditions, right? The work is necessary, but so is the downtime.
And you're STILL assuming that the 75-hour work week you would not get a severe case of burnout and turn into a 0-hour work week you for a year, after which going back to the regular schedule would simply not feel like an option.
Even if you didn't assume that, there is still an underlying assumption that working harder and getting more more money will in the long run make you happier than working shorter hours and having less.
I guess it depends on how much you are making. For 300k, I'll work 75 hours a week and not burn out. The incentive is there.
If you con me into working 75 hours a week for 70k, I'll burn out when I realize I've been wasting my time propping up a loser.
I'd imagine most people are the same. Pay them enough, and they will cope with terrible conditions. Con them, and they will lose interest a lot faster.
You can still burn out at 300k. Actually, you might be more likely to burn out with a higher salary, because you will find it easier to rationalize abusing yourself by cutting sleep, healthy food, friends, etc.
Burnout is an unconscious phenomena - you don't realize you're burning out while you're doing it, and in fact it often feels quite exhilarating. It's pretty easy to be making 300k and suddenly find you just can't perform the job duties that net you that 300k. It's not a matter of choice, determination, or coping, it's a matter of your brain refusing to do the things it needs to do.
> Say we fork the universe now and one version of you works 25 hour weeks henceforth, which the other works 50 hours per week henceforth. Who retires with more money and more impact on the world? Both version of you are equally smart. The well-rested you might make SLIGHTLY smarter decisions due to happiness/lack of fatigue perhaps... But surely you wouldn't contend that the success outcomes (professional impact and wealth, for the sake of argument) wouldn't be different.
It's hard to tell. Would I work better and smarter knowing that I only have a slim 5 hours a day to get stuff done? I think it may have more positive effects than you think - particularly if the rest of the time was doing things that will restore my energy (e.g. cultural activities, meeting people, sports, relaxing...)
Sure, YC encourages a kind of work-work-work attitude, and I'm not suggesting this necessarily will hurt you - in fact, because every YC founder is basically completely incompetent (at the beginning) and thrown into a maelstrom of challenges, it's not that surprising that there's a culture of working long hours to make up for lack of initial competence. But to suggest that somehow the eventual success comes because of the long hours (rather than because of the connections and wisdoms imparted by YC, as well as the fact that all or most YC founders are very smart) seems a bit confused to me...
I have no doubt that determination and enthusiasm are positively correlated with both success and with working long hours. However, as a rational skeptic, I've yet to see evidence that working long hours has a causal relationship to success.
However, there is evidence to suggest an inverse relationship may exist. Furthermore, hazing is effective in building solidarity, and people are generally more likely to retroactively justify hardship, which makes me think there may be a psychological bias towards overvaluing poor work/life balance.
"However, there is evidence to suggest an inverse relationship may exist."
So you'd bet that if I shadowed 1,000 self-made millionaires while they were building their businesses, and then shadowed a random sampling of (employed) Americans, the millionaires would work LESS than average? Really?
FWIW, I do agree that specialized knowledge work doesn't benefit from tons of hours... As someone pointed out in another comment, entrepreneurial success generally requires a wide variety of different tasks.
"So you'd bet that if I shadowed 1,000 self-made millionaires while they were building their businesses, and then shadowed a random sampling of (employed) Americans, the millionaires would work LESS than average? Really?"
No, I never said anything of the like. In fact, I said that the qualities more likely to make you successful are also likely to predict working long hours. What I would say is that if you could make two copies of the world, one where entrepreneurs work reasonable hours and one where they work extensive hours, they would generally have better outcomes with the former.
In essence, it seems that working in crunch mode for extended periods of time is a bad habit of highly motivated people.
"Entrepreneurial success generally requires a wide variety of different tasks."
Obviously, there are all sorts of businesses and all sorts of entrepreneurs, but I'm not sure that the data available suggests that working with varied tasks alleviates problems of fatigue. Additionally, the penalties of multitasking are generally well documented. If the tasks just need to be completed and are straight-forward, or if you're in a short lead-up to a deadline, certainly there are times when it makes sense to work extended hours.
On the more competitive business part, on average a developer only has about 3-4 peak hours of productivity during any given day. The time when your programming in the "zone" and get huge amounts of work done in minimal periods of time. The remaining time tends to be filler time, minor code cleanup, changes, being stuck on problems you would never encounter when still fresh/awake. etc.
When you increase work hours across the board you increasing this filler time of not especially high productivity work. At the same time you tend to decrease the amount of peak productivity/in the zone hours developers see each day due to the gradual effects of burn out.
It's not good for business.
Starting a business involves a lot more than just coding. Responding to employee emails, getting quotes for various bits of infrastructure, setting up the legal side of things, the banking side of things, all takes up a huge amount of time. It's not difficult however.
I find swombat's generalization incredibly insulting and naive. I've heard from many successful business founders that they often have no choice but to work long hours at the start. I know swombat is talking about regular long hours, but what is his definition of regular? There are always exceptions to the rule.
I don't have a lot of respect for people who make overly-general statements in absolutes. I have even less respect for those who feel the need to back up their statement by characterizing anyone who disagrees as incompetent, greedy, or otherwise.
I agree that in an established business, you shouldn't need to work 10 hours a day everyday. I'm very much for people having a balanced life, and for treating employees fairly. However, depending on the situation, there may be periods where you do need to work long hours. There are no golden rules in life that you can follow and be guaranteed success, no matter how smart you are. Everyone makes mistakes, and a failure doesn't mean you are incompetent.
I'd argue that the reason why you need to work long hours in a new business is because generally, people who start new businesses are incompetent.
Say what you want about the drive and determination of a bunch of 19-year-olds going through YC, but what they are not is competent. In fact, almost anyone, no matter their age and experience, is utterly incompetent at running their own business when they first get started.
I think your problem is that you're taking "incompetent" as a personal insult (not sure why you're doing that..) when it's meant as a statement of fact. I was certainly utterly incompetent when I started my first two businesses - and in fact I am still somewhat incompetent, as exemplified by the fact that I do need to work evenings and weekends every once in a while.
I assume when you say incompetent, you mean lacking in experience. That is correct, and often unavoidably so. Unfortunately, incompetent is typically used in a far more derogatory manner by most. Thus, I fear most people reading your post will take as a synonym for stupid.
But even with that clarified, I'll still disagree. The first 3-6 months of starting a business often involves a lot of busy work. This is not coding or otherwise requiring of immense thought, but it does take time. A great many business owners have said that it requires long hours to get a business up and running.
Of course, that does not apply to regular employees. Nor should it remain constant after you've started. Even so, heads of companies often do spend longer hours working than most. That's not to say their lives are unbalanced. Let me quote Bill Gates:
* It's a nice luxury to get some time to go write up my thoughts or follow up on meetings during the day. But sometimes that doesn't happen. So then it's great after the kids go to bed to be able to just sit at home and go through whatever e-mail I didn't get to. If the entire week is very busy, it's the weekend when I'll send the long, thoughtful pieces of e-mail. When people come in Monday morning, they'll see that I've been quite busy— they'll have a lot of e-mail.*
Working long hours is not always a sign of incompetence or lack of process. It still depends on the situation, and what you do in those hours. I do agree with a weaker statement, it shouldn't be that the majority of your employees always have to work long hours.
I think you're ignoring the group of people who both work smart (as you define) AND work long hours. That combination would probably have the highest correlation with success. It's not either / or.
I think you are missing the point of the thread. The argument was that working long hours gives you trade off with working smart. So it is an either /or, at least to some (in my opinion large) extent.
I can think of a few with ~$1B net worth that still find time to indulge their passions and still remain a regular human being.
The people I know who are highly successful work hard, and they take their work seriously. But they don't let their work consume them. There is still time for hobbies, passions, and human relationships once all the code has been written.
Continuous improvement, seeking out things you're doing wrong and fixing them, and generally paying attention to what you're doing and why you're doing it tend to trump raw hours any day.
That is something I've noticed too. Not a single one of the highly successful people I know is one-dimensional. They're all well-rounded human beings who spend time indulging whatever passions they have.
The only ones I know who are slightly less well-rounded but still successful, as I mentioned in another comment, are the corporate successful types - imho because they have less of a choice about how to manage their time.
I think there is a difference between working long hours and being 'married' to your work. People who are passionate about work will end up spending more time on their craft then those who are not, but they aren't always working. For example I read HN, and feel that it makes me better at work, but it's not work. I spend time outside of work doing things that are work like, but not my job because I really like what I do. No matter how much I like what I do, I can work long hours on any of it without getting burnt out, and if I do that for long periods of time I can feel the psychological drain.
Don't you think it's a bit unfair to call everyone who works long hours incompetent? I've seen point two that edw519 made a few times. If there's not enough work to pay for another employee, but just enough to pay for your kids college tuition if you make a lot of overtime, what should you do? Growing your business can take years before you can relax a little.
If the business can't grow and it's taking all your time, it's a crap business. Do something else with your time - no one's forcing you to continue flogging that particular horse. In today's world of opportunity, there are multitudes of ways to run a business that doesn't destroy your life to make a meagre profit... if you persist in running an unprofitable business which takes all your time, then, I guess that would also fall under "incompetent"...
This breaks down as soon as you have dependencies, e.g. a family, as you can't simply abandon your source of income. But aside from that, just because it takes a couple of years to grow a business into profitability doesn't make it not worthwhile, even if you have to put in a lot of work during those years. A large customer with an gradual payment system based on accreditation would be such a scenario.
Of course it's incompetent to cling to an unprofitable undertaking, but there are valid reasons for working overtime over an extended period.
I think that's generally true, but let's accept that startups aren't businesses. They're potential businesses. I suppose they fall into the 'failing' category in your example, except that's not very fair.. they haven't had much of a shot yet.
Until something gets off the ground, I wouldn't say working long hours doesn't make you lazy, greedy, incompetent or stupid. That said, it can certainly be counter-productive if done for too long.
100% agree. Long hours once in a while is just part of the dynamic nature of life. A job where the hours are consistently longer is ALWAYS a sign of bad management. Always.
This is the fallacy of long hours. You spend so many hours at work every day and every once in a while you have some late night inspiration or collaborative breakthrough or take advantage of some other opportunity, and then like any gambling addict you associate working long hours with the rewards. You ignore all the costs (stress, family strain, sleep deprivation, lower productivity, higher defect rates, etc.) It's classic confirmation bias.
Add to that the machismo notions that working long hours is working "harder" than otherwise and that working fewer hours shows less commitment and less strength. In reality it takes more focus, more smarts, and more discipline to work shorter hours effectively (sure, you can slack off by working fewer hours, but you can also slack off by working more hours too)
I think it's important that these long hours are the exception and not the rule. You do hit a burnout point eventually and this can be devastating for a start-up where you need your best and brightest being exactly that and coming up with new and better solutions to existing problems that will help put you ahead of the current and future competition.
Question, what do the long hours that are part of investment banking fall under. I haven't worked in it but might yet so I'm curious. I know there's a lot to do in a short amount of time in terms of the mood of the stock market like a small business, but c'mon, these are smart people, surely they can streamline some of these processes.
From my conversations with I-banker friends, it sounds like the long hours in I-banking are externally imposed. When a client is facing an imminent acquisition deal, it's very important that they get all their accounting straightened out, all their valuations nailed down while the acquirer is still interested. A delay usually means the deal falls through.
So when companies come to an I-banking firm, they're usually like "I need all your best people on this, stat." And because there're millions of dollars at stake, the I-banking firm will happily comply.
So I-bankers definitely fall into the "working late because of somebody else's incompetence" camp. In this case, it's customers. There're various things that startups could do that would make I-banker's jobs a lot easier: keep good accounting records, make sure they're completely covered legally, have solid revenue streams, don't get all buddy-buddy with potential acquirers. But startups that do all this rarely need an I-banker to close the deal; they just negotiate directly with a potential acquirer, have the lawyers draw up a deal, and sign it.
Basically, the I-banking business model is trading other people's stupidity for cash. It's the same thing with management consultants, and divorce attorneys, and litigators, all also professions that can make a lot of money but have shitty quality of life.
Enterprise: Incompetent management, lazy co-workers, and spoiled users.
Small Business: Tough competition and limited resources.
Startup: Taking advantage of opportunites that may not pass this way again.