<i>I spoke to someone a few months ago, and what I remember most vividly about the conversation was when he said, "once your team starts going home for dinner, you know you're in trouble."</i><p>This is an example of a social pathology on two levels. First, it means that working for that one particular company sucks. Second, it is being deployed to make working sucks normative at <i>other</i> companies, too. (And if it gets widely repeated by credulous entrepreneurs, it will infect their lives, their employees lives, etc etc. The viral factor of suck in the social graph has exceeded k = 1.0, watch out!)<p>It has not been my experience that the narrative this social pathology tells about work being necessarily all-consuming has basis in objective reality. I've done all-consuming work. My business' schedule doesn't resemble that schedule even a little itty-bitty bit.
Work/Life Balance is fundamentally a personal thing. If you make it a priority, you can take it with you anywhere you go.<p>When I talk to a potential employer, I make a point of telling them that I work 40 hour weeks and I take a lot of time off. I've gone so far as to negotiate away my stock options in favor of extra paid holiday and the ability to take unpaid leave. Even when working for startups that think they're in crunch mode (and have been for the last 6 months), I make Life a priority.<p>Where I can, I try to spread the faith. Surprisingly, I've never experienced a case where I couldn't fix things and had to leave.<p>Stress is infectious. But so is Sanity. I've walked into shops where 60 hour weeks were the norm and managed to infect the team with the concept of Work/Life balance. First, you introduce the idea of "the weekend", where I'm living the back of my truck next to a crag someplace (and so should you), so don't try to contact me. Then you bring in "leave at six", then eventually "40 hour weeks". All the while keeping the rest of the team on board with the idea that maybe we should have lives apart from work.<p>Eventually, you have a whole team working 40 hour weeks and not looking so unhealthy. Some of whom even have stories to tell when you ask what they did for the weekend. Better still, if <i>everybody</i> is slacking off at a sane pace, there's really nothing that management can do about it (except notice how much more work is getting done).
I founded a startup with my brother 5 years ago - we launched in my two weeks paternity leave from work. For the first 4 years we both held down full time jobs and worked on our startup every evening. I had my 2nd child when the startup turned 4 any my brother had his first around the same time. I'm not sure if it's because we are family, but we've always had a policy (not written down or set in stone) but that if one of us wants some time off then we do.<p>We pretty much do normal hours (10 - 6), we still work a few evenings, but we're now both full time so haven't got the added stress of a 'day job'. It was always our dream to be able to work full time on our startup and now that's a reality there is honestly no other job i'd rather be doing. We both get to see our kids everyday, i'm due to be taking my eldest (4) swimming at lunch.<p>Based on my experience (every startup is different), we do live and breath it, but at the same time we always make time for family, holidays and anything else we want to do (taking the kids for days out, nursery, the gym). Our startup is actually doing better than ever and I personally feel that because we put in all the work in the first few years whilst holding down a full time job we are now in a position to be able to enjoy the fruits of our labour and have a great work/life balance.
It's not a pipedream. We run a dev team that is both productive and enthused about the work we do. Every single engineer is out the door by 6, unless there is something that needs completing urgently. We are constantly shipping new versions of our product, are very profitable and have a minute churn rate of developers.<p>My gut feeling is that developers who cultivate a lifestyle that will inevitably lead to them burning out are either drinking the koolaid of some kind of cliched' notion of how developers should perform, or are simply being exploited by their employers.<p>Everyone has a right to see their family and keep fit, and in this sellers market, developers CAN work at a sustainable pace that doesnt put their future careers at stake.
I think the question is entirely different for founders and employees.<p>For founders, the question loses some of its meaning, because the company itself is intrinsically tied to personal goals. Founders tend to not refer to the company as "a job". It's something of a different beast. This doesn't mean that some time doing non-company stuff won't ever be required to maintain sanity, but the dynamics are pretty different.<p>For employees, which this post seems to be about, you're ultimately working to fulfill <i>someone else's</i> personal goals. There it makes a lot more sense to balance working on <i>your own</i> personal goals and pastimes or whatever with working on the goals of the person who's signing your paychecks. The problem is that if there's a sufficient supply of employees who are willing to forgo that for whatever reason (loving the work, not having much of a life, peer pressure) then they're more likely to be favored by the employers with the implications that go along with that.
I have been involving in a startup since one year ago. Result: I broke one relationship, and missed another. When my mom came visiting me from another state I didn't have the time to bring her around, and not even the time to talk to her. When everyone is enjoying the weekends I have to lock myself in my room and code, code CODE. When everyone is enjoying TVs after coming back from work, I read emails, filter resumes and do other work related stuffs. I don't have personal life; all of my time is consumed by this one little startup which may or may not work in the future.<p>Now you know why relationship won't work for me at this stage of time?<p>So whenever someone told me that they could have a nice work/life balance at a startup, I smiled. And when girls told me that they would support their husbands in pursuing their dreams at all cost, I could only conclude that they didn't know what they wish for.<p>They haven't seen the true cost of startup, yet.
I'm involved in a startup since 9 months ago. After the first 3 months wich were loaded with tons of work, long hours and a lot of stress someone told me to categorize the work on my todo-list, to think about wich tasks i could delegate to others and to filter the most important ones (a common model for this wich helped me a lot can be found here: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_management#The_Eisenhower_Method" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_management#The_Eisenhower_...</a>).
Now I still have a lot to do, but i can manage to take a day off from time to time, i even went skiing for 4 days without working there.
In my opinion people lose their attitude and motivation if they dont take time to do something besides working and think about other things.
Until someone can prove that more hours = more value, I refuse to believe this "startup mentality" is anything but a cargo cult mentality.<p>Weird for a culture that so prizes data and science to endlessly repeat certain mantras as truth without any validation.
What I found is that passion is one of those things that always seems excessive in retrospect and insufficient going forward. When I reflect on my periods of professional exuberance, I am always struck by how much I missed out being with my family and friends. Likewise, in the times of lull I am always guilt tripping myself about not being passionate enough, or not giving it my all.<p>Ultimately, the right balance depends on your own perspective on life, which in term depends on your age, personality, family situation, etc. But the older I get the more convinced I become that you can't go wrong if you err on the side of life.
I see some references to family throughout the comments, but one fundamental thing is that things are different once you have a family. The founder of our startup always goes home to have dinner w/ his wife and kids, but it would be a complete mistake to say he's slacking -- he works late into the night from home.<p>Steve Blank wrote a great post about how to navigate this tricky balance of startup/family and what worked for him. It's here: <a href="http://steveblank.com/2009/06/18/epitaph-for-an-entrepreneur/" rel="nofollow">http://steveblank.com/2009/06/18/epitaph-for-an-entrepreneur...</a>
If your team cannot wait to leave at 6 you have a problem, but if you send your team home at 6 because they worked efficiently and achieved something, that's some work life balance then.
I believe that beyond work/life balance there is a difference between hard work and madness.<p>Many startups (and companies) need to go to a psychiatric hospital, they are very unorganized and the team leaders doesn't take full responsability and respect for people times.<p>Another thing is being really focused and concentrated on moving forward in your 40 hours week (not checking HN too much...) and doing extra hours when it's really necessary.
The most important thing for founders to remember, even if they are under the gun is that keeping employees working longer hours for a sustained duration will result in a less reliable product.<p>I have tried to work 80-100 hours on several occasions for a month or so and just ended up ripping up most of what I wrote. I have settled into an average of about a 65 hour workweek by picking up the laptop whenever I feel like it and stopping when I feel the pointless churn beginning. My output, as measured by Pivotal Tracker is much higher working less hours, point being my meaningful productivity is higher.<p>If I had an employee working that much of their own volition, I would start offer help on their process and would want to work with them on why they are approaching things in such a brute-force manner.<p>I would also see it as a failure on my part to set the right expectations with customers, investors, etc...<p>Work/Life balance is relative, but I don't think anyone can sustain a quality output at 80 hours a week for more than 3 weeks or so.
Perhaps I'm naive, but when I see companies that work like this I assume they either don't know any better or are just scared stupid. Or perhaps it is a macho startup thing.
I disagree with a few comments here- if i go home I am just going to play xbox, would it not be spent better writing code?<p>Plus I enjoy what I do in the office, it can be stressful but its not like 12-16 hours hard physical labour.<p>I dont work weekends though other than answer email or support requests
I don't dare to make any sweeping generalizations about this, but I would love to see how age, location and amount of time spent working at startups correlates with some of the opinions here. I suspect there might be some interesting (if not entirely unsurprising) trends there.
Balance <i>is</i> a pipedream. Success is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration - glib, but true.<p>We started 5 years ago - I've been on call 24/7 ever since. We've now got other people on call too, sure, but as the technical lead, I'm where the buck stops. An average week is in the region of 70-80 hours work.<p>I have precious little in the way of "life" - I allow myself a few hours off once a week on Thursdays, but apart from that, spend my time glued to my laptop, growing the business.<p>That said, I see several ways out.<p>1) This sucker actually works, and we retire.
2) This sucker actually works, and we grow it into a behemoth.
3) Ditto and we sell, and I re-invest the proceeds into my next mad idea.<p>1 is pretty unlikely. 2&3 are far more likely, which rather reflects the fact that my work <i>is</i> my life, and if you're doing a startup without that attitude, it's going to suffer. A startup is effectively all about selling a "regular" 20/30's for a decade (or two) of brutally hard work, high stress, and attaining financial and inventive freedom.<p>Sorry, I'm rambling. No coffee yet this morning.
I don't get this. On the one hand there's the 40h-a-week camp, backed up by plenty of research [1] and on the other hand there's the work-as-much-as-you-possibly-can camp, which seems to be what plenty of successful startup have been following. So what's the deal? Why this discrepancy?
It's not about manual vs knowledge working - studies on knowledge workers show that even less than 40h / week is beneficial. Is it about the difference in possible leverage? Self-directed work? The close link between work and payoff? The stressful situation in a startup? The 100% commitment?<p>Any attempts to pin down why and under what circumstances [2] different work hour guidelines should apply would be greatly appreciated.<p>1: See studies in this pdf <a href="http://www.lostgarden.com/2008/09/rules-of-productivity-presentation.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.lostgarden.com/2008/09/rules-of-productivity-pres...</a><p>2: What's the difference between starting your own company, running your own company, joining a startup, doing a PhD, being in a research team, working at an established startup?