What Long Hours Really Mean

Every human being deserves an average of 8 hours of work, 8 hours of family&#x2F;leisure, 8 hours of sleep and 2 days a week free. <i>Even a doctor on whom many lives are depending</i>. Lives of critical employees are just as valuable as the lives of those who are affected if they don&#x27;t work harder. The whole &quot;if I don&#x27;t do this, the project will sink &#x2F; things will be destroyed&quot; is a self-imposed ransom situation that managers count on.

I think the last point is also the most important: working longer hours does not make you more productive on an <i>absolute</i> scale! It&#x27;s not that you accomplish less per hour, it&#x27;s that you accomplish less full stop.<p>Now, working an 80-hour week once in a <i>rare</i> while? That actually works. If you have a really important deadline or really need to get something done, sure. But doing it regularly is completely irrational. Take a look at &quot;Why Crunch Mode Doesn&#x27;t Work&quot;[1].<p>[1]: <a href="http://devopsangle.com/2012/04/18/what-research-says-about-working-long-hours/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;devopsangle.com&#x2F;2012&#x2F;04&#x2F;18&#x2F;what-research-says-about-w...</a><p>It&#x27;s also very important not to fall into a trap that demands extreme hours often. It&#x27;s too easy to think it&#x27;ll be &quot;just this once&quot;. And if it really is just once--for some very good reason--then fine. But if you catch yourself doing it repeatedly, watch out.<p>If you want to accomplish anything, you should of course be willing to work hard. But, more importantly, you have to work <i>efficiently</i>. Constantly working long hours might be hard, but it&#x27;s not efficient. Especially for a startup, how hard or long you worked simply does not matter--what&#x27;s important is what you accomplished.

I always feel super lazy when I read these articles criticizing excessively long work weeks. Honestly, I think 40 hours is way too long, especially when the bulk of it is boring.<p>That being said, when you&#x27;re working on something you enjoy and you get into that &quot;flow&quot; state, time becomes irrelevant. If something is fun and energizes you, you can do it without watching the clock, which the author does with his side projects.<p>If you work at a regular job and say you get into that flow state for 2 hour or so, when you&#x27;re done, you realize, &quot;shit, i have to be here for another 6 hours.&quot; Then you spend a lot of time dicking around on the internet&#x2F;answering e-mails&#x2F;doing non mentally taxing stuff. However, those 6 hours are actually pretty draining&#x2F;depressing because you have to maintain the illusion that you&#x27;re working + deal with the guilt that you&#x27;re not being productive.<p>I dunno, maybe I&#x27;m just especially lazy and would like to spend as little time as possible working on things I don&#x27;t enjoy.

&quot;Working for free&quot; after 40 hours never resonated with me. It comes out of hard fought labor battles, but an assembly line is difficult to relate to when I&#x27;m eating free snacks in my comfy Aeron chair and working on things that generally interest me.<p>I think the biggest issue here is misaligned expectations between boss and worker. Personally, I&#x27;ve always gone into a job understanding what it was going to take to be successful. My comp expectations are adjusted accordingly. In trading bonds, which is nearly a 24 hour market, it does require &gt;8 hours on the trading floor. At the end of the year my boss doesn&#x27;t really care about my hours as long as our customers are happy and I&#x27;ve produced PnL.

Working even half an hour extra each day adds up to ~3 weeks a year of extra work that you&#x27;re not getting paid for. That&#x27;s several thousand dollars in wages. It&#x27;s easy to dismiss a half-hour here or there but if you sit down and run the numbers, it&#x27;s quite an unpleasant conclusion.

Most of these articles that deride long work hours don&#x27;t account for the following:<p>1. When you are the smartest in the room, you can get away with 40 hours because what you produce in 40 hours will be orders of magnitude ahead of what a normal guy produces in 80 hours. Trouble comes when you start being part of super smart teams (mine has about 9 engineers sharing around 150 years of systems&#x2F;db building expertise amongst them). Here 40 hours gets you only to the &#x27;achieved level&#x27;. For some people this is not good enough, especially if they come from a continuous string of &#x27;excelled levels&#x27;.<p>2. I am not paid to do 40 hours of work. I am paid to get things done. Some things are automatable (which we do) but a lot of things require NLP and is hard to automate. These we do manually. They add up.<p>3. It is VERY hard to hire good senior engineers. My company (Amazon) pays a ton of money, has offices in great cities but still we find hiring hard. This means you won&#x27;t be offloading a bunch of those anytime soon and to be competitive, you have to do this.<p>4. Many of us do this not out of coercion, but because we want to. I personally have a set of goals, own a bunch of stuff that I really want to get done. 8 hours is not enough.<p>5. As you grow senior, you spend a ton of time co-ordinating work. This means unless you dedicate time before and after regular office hours, you personally aren&#x27;t going to get coding done. And somethings require your personal coding&#x2F;debugging effort - no way around it.<p>Family setup is personal: At least in my case, thankfully my wife chose to be a home maker and a full time mom. This frees up a lot of my responsibilities and allows me to focus harder on my job for the betterment of the family as a unit. YMMV.<p>EDIT: I always plug my team, so will do it again here. We are hiring. If you want to work with world class engineers in a great &amp; growing service (AWS DynamoDB) - PM me. I chose this for the learning and no regrets till date.

Those who fail to read <i>The Mythical Man Month</i> are doomed to... actually, just doomed.

I&#x27;ve found that long hours are indicators, sometimes of good things and other times not. Long hours over a lengthy duration of time have shown me two things: 1) an individual&#x27;s work ethic, and 2) bad management.<p>In the tech industry, specifically with software development, I&#x27;ve had teams I&#x27;ve managed where we needed to pull longer hours in order to meet a deadline. And my teams stepped up, because we all wanted to succeed. The long hours were a known entity, and weren&#x27;t the negative <i>long hours</i>.<p>I&#x27;ve also had teams forced into the negative long hours, and those were my fault (or rather, they were my responsibility to manage and I didn&#x27;t do a good job.) Environments that somehow believe that those of us in the tech industry somehow enjoy acts like the &quot;diving catch&quot; and being &quot;the savior&quot; offer no value, other than learning what not to do.<p>The biggest thing to be cautious with long-hour situations is burnout. The negative long-hour scenarios can lead to resentment, but those feelings often pass after a while. Burnout, on the other hand, can have very real long-term consequences.

Well said. Most of the points can be derived from the first one (&quot;You are working for free&quot;), much in the way that most of Mechanical Engineering can be derived from F=MA. Once you take that idea on board, the motivations behind companies, managers, clients, etc. creating a culture of &quot;Heros That Work Long Hours&quot; become rather transparent.<p>Adding &quot;long hours don&#x27;t actually mean you get more stuff done&quot; into the mix is just a little ironic icing to the whole situation.

This posts seems to resonate well with the &quot;Electronic Arts Spouse&quot;-post from 2004:<p><a href="http://ea-spouse.livejournal.com/274.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;ea-spouse.livejournal.com&#x2F;274.html</a><p>(Poor management, poor planning, dropping productivity per hour worked as the workday is increased).<p>It&#x27;s nothing new of course, Ford pushed for 8 hour shifts, not out of the kindness of his heart.<p>As for working &quot;for free&quot; -- that could be seen as poor labour laws. Norway has very strict rules regarding work hours (and compensation). Not that they&#x27;re not broken -- but generally only managers (or others who <i>realistically</i> can set their own hours) are allowed effectively unlimited over time.

This reminds me of the section in Freakonomics[1] about how drug gangs are organised. Only the top guys actually rake in the money. The rank and file are wannabes giving their time and taking all the risk with little reward, in the hope that they&#x27;ll get noticed. Ring any bells?<p>Funny and scary in equal measure.<p>*1 <a href="http://freakonomics.com/books/freakonomics/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;freakonomics.com&#x2F;books&#x2F;freakonomics&#x2F;</a>

My long hours story. (in summary form)<p>Small company got acquired by a big 4 accounting firm. Lots of changes, seemingly lots of room for growth. Some people left. I stepped up (no promotion or raise) and took over for several departed people. Worked 12-14 hour days, 6 days a week, for 10 months. Received the highest performance award, which is given to 0.25% of the 50k+ employees in the US. Got a 1.25% raise because our unit was underperforming as a whole. Quit 4 months later. (after taking 2 months off after my second daughter was born.)

During my first startup, I worked 6 or 7 day weeks, 13+ hours a day. At Hyperink, in my first year, I (on my own accord) slept in the office over 30 days. During this entire stretch, I was perhaps more productive and happier than any other time I can remember. The main reason why? The teams and the comradery.<p>I wish this article at least had relevant studies + statistics on this subject as it is not representative of any of the 4 startup experiences I&#x27;ve been involved with. Actually, in diametric opposition to this author&#x27;s stance, our teams&#x27; cultures were united and strenghtened around the concept of working hard (which, in our case, happened to at least partly equate to long hours).<p>I should be fair and admit, it may be the case that this article is more relevant to later stage companies -- I don&#x27;t have a great amount of experience at 100+ employee companies.<p>From my experience, when one loves what one works on, one often works on said thing a lot. Some of the hardest working people I know work (addictively) towards projects they&#x27;re not (necessarily) paid to work on. For instance, one of my teammates, Mischief, spends about 5 hours a day porting packages over to Plan9 and writing terminal emulators in go (why not).<p>Im not so enlightened that I can draw conclusions about people who _don&#x27;t_ work long hours, but it seems intuitive that people who do work long hours fall into one of two binary classes: (1) they are forced to (in order to achieve some level of compensation) &#x2F; fear layoff, (2) they like the product, team, or like working hard. That is, intrinsically one either wants to work hard or they don&#x27;t want to.<p>You want people in the latter category, and you achieve this by being fair with equity, providing people opportunities to have an impact or work on what they love, by providing a supporting environment, and by having good hiring practices.<p>There will always be great people who love your team &#x2F; vision &#x2F; culture &#x2F; management (un)structure and who physically cannot commit to 70 hour work weeks (family, etc). You and your team have to decide whether it makes sense for this person to be part of the team and be prepared to make adjustments to make it work.<p>What I wish this article was about:<p>* How teams can (and should learn to) effectively prioritize teammates&#x27; health<p>* Why pressure to work hard can be destructive<p>* How to programmatically or systematically eliminate or amortize stressful tech&#x2F;scaling&#x2F;hr&#x2F;bd problems to avoid disasters.<p>[edit: fixing typos]

Next time you are on an airliner think what kind of &quot;work ethic&quot; you&#x27;d like your pilot to have. One who puts in 80 hours a week, or a &quot;lazy&quot; one who only works 30 hours per week.<p>(Note that FAA actually limits how many hours a week an airline pilot can fly. I think the number is close to 30).

From my experience, I can only agree. Aged 24, I was given responsibly for a near 150-year-old weekly newspaper which is read by more than 30,000 people a week. Needless to say, I ended up working a quite ridiculous amount of unpaid overtime.<p>Keep asking myself why I put in all the extra hours. Journalism&#x27;s about as competitive an industry as exists but I didn&#x27;t have self-advancement in mind. It wasn&#x27;t because it was almost expected even if unwritten. Nor was it because of procrastination.<p>The explanation that jumps to mind&#x27;s two-fold.<p>First, circumstance and necessity. The industry&#x27;s not so much shrinking as shrivelling. By the time I left in July, I had two full-time staff to produce a newspaper which more oft than not numbered more than 100 tabloid pages. To give those numbers some context, there were many fewer pages and many more editorial staff when the paper was founded in the 1800s. Jobs simply needed doing and I was a willing horse.<p>And second, pride. Not pride in long hours but pride in a job well done. I was a martyr to the readers&#x27; cause and I was going to put out the best paper in my power.<p>However, three years later and long burned out, it was part a wider culture which culminated in me leaving the company. I&#x27;ve drawn similar conclusions to the author when he says work long hours--but only on your own terms.

In my first development job, I worked very long hours — perhaps because I didn&#x27;t have great mentors, often worked remotely, and found myself doing tons of learning&#x2F;education just to get by. This was OK for a while; I had to pay my dues and learn how to do the job, but I do not think it is sustainable, after the first year I burned out and was ready to move on.<p>Now, I prefer long, uninterrupted workdays, but I do not like to work much more than 40 hours per week. The traditional 5 day per week model is not perfect, though. I prefer 4 longer days (10-12 hours), and 3 days off.

This entire piece is written from the perspective of someone who sees their job as only a way to make money. That person might look at me and say something along the lines of &quot;look at him, wasting his life away spending time at work.&quot; To me, though, he is the one wasting his life spending even a few hours a day to do something he would not do for free. If you don&#x27;t absolutely love your job, quit. And if you absolutely love your job, why the hell wouldn&#x27;t you want to stay a few more minutes?

&quot;LONG HOURS ≠ MORE PRODUCTIVITY OR BETTER WORK.&quot;<p>this is false and debunked in mythical man month. It follows from &quot;adding manpower to a late software project makes it later&quot; that we need to add hours, not people. Or we can break our contract if we&#x27;d rather to that.<p>&quot;We respect ourselves and our people enough to honor their time and their personal lives so we cannot agree to your deadline.&quot;<p>This also misses the point - projects start on time and end late. at the time the deadline was agreed to, we happily accepted payment.

I&#x27;m a neuroscientist by training. I&#x27;m really surprised that we don&#x27;t talk today about the brain among knowledge workers like we do muscles with professional athletes. We all know that less sleep, worse nutrition, and long hours affect how we perform. Yet, we still expect to work 60 to 80 weeks and be at our best? It makes no sense and some day we&#x27;ll look back and wonder what this generation was thinking.

&quot;Working for free&quot; after 40 hours isn&#x27;t necessarily accurate if you are on salary, at least if your company is run reasonably well. At my job, I&#x27;m paid a salary based on my performance and the quality of my deliverables. If I finish those in less than 40 hours, I am free to go home (although I generally stay and get some work done on projects that are less time sensitive), but if I have to stay late to finish them, I may end up working more than 40 hours. Nowhere in my agreement to come work here was 40 hours a week specified. If it became the norm that I worked 60 hours a week to complete my deliverables (and I wasn&#x27;t sandbagging), I would ask for a raise to reflect that.<p>However, I agree that many companies are not great at this. While my company is not perfect, their handling of this issue is one of the many things they do extremely well.

This is an emotional topic, the discussion of which is nearly always evidence-free. How could one study it objectively?

Something always troubled me: Why are long hours the equilibrium? If everyone is fighting to hire engineers, why not proudly declare &quot;We&#x27;re working 40 hours a week here, and still pay market rates&quot;? Every engineer in town would consider working for you. Or not?

Long hours often die out when the compensation (i.e. share options) dries up.<p>I started off working 80+ hours a week, as did many of the others, and loved it. We all did pretty nicely out of it thanks to share options.<p>But 10 years later, post acquisition(s), and most people who are still here have families and more life outside work. I work part time so I have a day with my daughter and I officially work 33 hours a week, in a &quot;long&quot; week I maybe work 35 hours and I rarely ever take my laptop home. It&#x27;s all helped me to be a lot more focused in the relatively short time I am at work.<p>I guess a lot of it is about experience and, as the saying goes, &quot;Good judgement comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgement.&quot;

I think the article is missing a very important point. Forced long hours are disastrous. But there are plenty of projects where people automatically put in long hours because the experience is rewarding. Either the money is good, or the project is interesting, or there is tons to learn. That varies from person to person.<p>This is yet another thing that I see with regards to procrastination. It automatically seems to vanish every time I work on some interesting projects, or if good money is involved. If you are unconsciously procrastinating for no good reason, may its a good sign that you find that project no longer rewarding. And its time to move onto something else.

Long hours mean facetime - the illusion of working as hard or harder than your peers. I&#x27;ve worked in industries where this is the norm - it&#x27;s terrible.<p>Especially if you actually are more productive than others, because then you&#x27;re in a situation where you know you&#x27;re working more hours than you need to, being unproductive, yet you know that the more work you finish, the more will be put onto your plate and the less likely you&#x27;ll ever be able to have a decent work-life balance. So you wind up sandbagging it, put in the facetime for the hell of it, and look for a new job...

While I take issue ith the &quot;deserves&quot; comment floating around the top of the page, in general the article is spot-on. For the most part, extended periods of high volumes of work indicate a project is either under-staffed or poorly managed.<p>Sprints and pushes now and again are exceptions -- there is nothing inherently wrong with needing to put in a long week or two, even a month or two, irregularly in order to get a feature out that just needs to be built. But extended continual work definitely does sap the creativity and stress every relationship a person has outside of the office.

I don&#x27;t mind working long hours so long as I am actually gaining useful knowledge which I can leverage later to get many times those hours back.

I work long hours and I know it adds 0$&#x2F;hour into my account. My motivation is to build a product that I can proudly add in my portfolio and it may help me tap bigger opportunities in future. I consider it as investment, and I am fully aware that, like other investments, it may turn out to be zero. But then every effort worth-doing in life is a gamble and nothing comes with assurities.

No, this is what long hours mean to someone who doesn&#x27;t want to work long hours but does out of some obligation or feeling that they should or have to.<p>I&#x27;ve said it before, but these kinds of articles&#x2F;blog posts always read as a justification on the part of the author for not working more.

Seeing as I grew up on 80+ hour workweeks, I can promise you this is false for a certain group of people.<p>I spent two years in banking - normally we had 18+ hour workdays... definitely gave me stamina later on.<p>Tier 1 bonus bucket at a bulge bracket one year, Tier 2 the other year.<p>You pretty much always end up getting paid for hard work.

This work hours issue is quite contentious. I don&#x27;t want to stifle discussion but right now I wish there was a standard &quot;gwen&quot; response at the top of the thread with well researched papers on the subject.

On a side note:<p>Your blog looks fantastic. Clean &amp; simple without looking like it&#x27;s trying too hard. Nicely done.

This: &quot;There’s little difference in my productivity in a 80 or 40 hour work week.&quot;

Find a job you love, and you&#x27;ll never have to work a day in your life.

There are many personal reasons people have for working long hours.<p>Factor in:<p>1. Love of what you do<p>2. Computer addiction (which is not in the DSM (yet))<p>3. Avoiding other forms of stress not work-related<p>[EDIT:] Hello, Japan!