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 long it will take to get resources from them. When I asked a question, it took anywhere from 48 hours to an entire week to get a response. When I completed a task, I got no response.

But I needed to be on call because they would sent hundreds of emails about everything except what was needed. I charged them for all the hours I spent waiting for them, and reading long emails that led nowhere.

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 VP on the team didn't like the updates the Associate wanted. Organizations are set up to be inefficient in order to signal how serious they are and what hard workers they have.

[0] https://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/

Interesting but unsurprising article.

I receive a thank you note from our practice lead every time my utilization exceeds 100% in a week. I have repeatedly asked to be removed from such "congratulatory" emails, as I don't find it something to be lauded. In my mind, this means I/we have not properly planned, scheduled, costed, or staffed a project.

Market disagrees though; long hours are absolutely the norm in my segment, and while I've seen managers of all types, those more and less understanding that there's life outside of the office, nonetheless there is an overall feeling that if you're not working long hours, you're not working hard or contributing or dedicated enough.

At the same time, it is an accepted paradigm that project/client/company will suck what they can out of you, and it's up to you to set the limits, communicate them and deliver quality. I have observed people who at beginning of the project indicate "I will take my vacation, and I will spend my weekends at home", and due to quality of their work and abilities, are respected, promoted, recognized.

So there's culture and there's individual response to the culture.

[personally, I "enjoy" a sprint or two every now and then, there's excitement in building something and working hard towards it; but still believe that continued crunches are failure of planning. That doesn't mean I'm immune to them :P, just that I refuse to consider them the norm]

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 workload, who were disproportionately women, suffered in their performance reviews; those who took a lighter workload more discreetly didn’t suffer. The maxim of “ask forgiveness, not permission” seemed to apply.

This is generally good advice to live by. If something is worth doing, you are wildly better off just doing it, rather than asking for permission to do it. At best, the thing you wanted to do will get denied, and at worst so crusted up with input and bikeshedding from everyone that is sucked into it that it is actively detrimental.

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 operating at greatly diminished mental capacity.

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.

Makes fairly rational sense -- in addition to the hard deliverables provided by professional services firms (market studies, fairness opinions, consummated M&A transactions, etc), their "product" is to a great extent the warm-n-fuzzy feeling that clients get from the general perception that a bunch of intelligent, highly educated and broadly competent, insecure overachievers are burning the midnight oil to triple-check that everything is going to plan and there are no contingencies left unexamined.

As such, on a meta level, the "product" in this regard is not some kind of impartial measurable standard of client-related vigilance, but rather, constant reinforcement of a perception in the client's mind. And so, it's totally rational that, for example, investment banking associates will always respond to a late-night email from the client's internal M&A guy or corporate development lady on the same night the incoming email was sent -- even if it's an email of the "hey no need to respond to this, just wanted to make sure I sent you the attachment" variety. Maintaining the perception that someone is always watching the store is paramount not only in maintaining client relationships, but also in justifying high fees.

I'm not sure where the "faking it" comes from. The point seems to be people who get their job done and don't make a big deal out of structuring their work arrangements to create more flexibility/fewer hours don't get penalized. Which squares with my personal experience though obviously doesn't apply everywhere and isn't something you can always depend on being able to do on an informal basis.

I find modern communications are a big help in this regard. In past lives, there often was no real replacement for being literally "by the phone." Though I still took month-long vacations in those days which some co-workers found rather hard to comprehend.

Two anedoctal stories of mine:

a) I do some consulting for a healthcare company, and bill them by the hour. It is very difficult to reach 60h/month, I managed to get that once, and it translated to an incredible amount of work. Initially they were worried about the cost, and put a cap of 80h/mo, but I never got even near that.

b) Back in the 1990s I worked as technical support for a small ERP company. I had a colleague that kept a frantic pace the whole day, did a lot of overtime, always buried by work, complaining, etc. He had so many booked overtime hours, he took a 3-week vacation solely on them (in Brazil you have 30 day of vacation per year, as well).

Those 3 weeks were the most quiet I ever saw in my work. I even found the K&R book and learnt C (I was really amused to find that UNIXes came with a free compiler. Development tools used to cost several thousand USD back then.)

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 completed, what will be completed by next week, and how we can allocate resources to accomplish these things."

To me this seems like an incredibly good way of managing this relationship. However, plenty of people I talk to on the other side (trying to hire consultants) insist that they need a full bid of how much time a project will take.

I almost always tell these people that I can't really give them that answer, and that I also to be wary of anybody who actually responds to this question.

Am I the strange one here?

I almost wonder if this is the source of the overage that is being talked about in this article. They're quoting them $foo hours per week, when in reality it will take $foo/4. So when they get the work and finish it at $foo/2, they don't lose money.

That seems really dishonest to me.

In the same spirit of "play stupid games, win stupid prizes", I'll describe this as "making stupid demands is asking to be deceived"

" For people who were good at faking it, there was no real damage done by their lighter workloads."

Well, duh. The customer is the limiting factor in a lot of cases and downtime means you get to focus more on the work (when you're actually working)

I had a big fight with the other co-founders of a company regarding work hours a while back. Most programmers hit something like up to four "good" hours per workday, the biggest problem is capturing those hours while they're at work. A separate problem is hitting those hours while they have access to their manager or colleagues that can help them overcome small but time consuming problems.

I'd like to think that programmers have a creative or even artistic occupation (personally I'm more manager than programmer these days). Forcing something creative out is rarely good or even possible. The majority of the employees in my organization are in sales. There's a limit to where you can push that for most people too, but it is a different kind of limit.

Personally I've only put in proper 80-hour work weeks something like three times working as a disillusioned startup "employee" or as a consultant in extreme crunch because of launch marketing costs. Sure, something is deployed and it you certainly feel a sense of accomplishment but it's not something that should be used by any serious company expecting people to stay longer than a year or two.

With that said: people checking/answering their email or checking error logs at odd hours "for free" really do bring value to a company though.

It is possible to do 80 hour workweeks if:

- The rest of your life is exactly where you want it to be. So, this one isn't true for 99% of the population.

- You have the correct mental attitude for it. This isn't true for most of the population either.

- You are doing exactly what you want to do in life. The chance that you could be distracted by another possibility / avenue is next to nil.

None of the above are impossible asks, but they certainly unreasonable. But some managers like to ask anyway, mostly as a form of leverage. If you're foolish or desperate enough to fall for it, then well, only fools and desperate people will give you time week after week to listen to how much you hate your boss / job.

Does anyone actually accomplish 40 hours of work a week within a 40 hour work week?

In a typical 40 hour work week, it'd take me 80 hour 'of time at work' to actually get the 40 hours of actual work, meaning most weeks, I might to 18-25 hours of actual work.

The issue, I think here, is requiring people to go to a place, to do a thing, for X hours per week - given the ability to be flexible about working hours, most people will do more, in less time, and be more available for customer needs.

Don’t be fooled. That third group has also a shitty life. I’ve been there. I had exactly that life.

It’s not the working hours that take the toll on you but the lifestyle in general. Just consider this from the article: “I try to head out by 5, get home at 5:30, have dinner, play with my daughter,” he said

Yes, I did that too. You’re dead zombie walking after a couple of weeks getting up at 4:30am just to be back at 5/6pm to play with the kids, catch up on mails and calls you’ve missed after the family went to bed until 11/12 or even 1am just to get up at 4:30am again for the next round

I remember a story from a BigCo consultant. Many years ago, when he worked remote and wanted to appear busy, he turned on his oscillating fan and tied a string to it and then to the wired mouse of his computer so that the 2000-era “idle” detection (used for chat “presence”) of the computer would not kick in.

You Americans are messing eachother up with your workaholic culture. Relax folks, there’s much more to life.

In the NYT comments someone said

>>"Consulting and Finance are like sports..."

In my experience this is exactly true. Assuming competence in the area you are consulting - It is most definately a sport of managing expectations more than doing actual work. Companies expect to be billed for time you spend sitting around waiting for emails and other things of that nature. More hours "worked" is not equal to more actual "work".

I have definitely seen this is various ways. Another outcome of the intense pressure to deliver hours is when you have a simple phone call with lawyers / accountants and there are 2 parters, 3 associates, and an assistant taking notes. Haven’t you guys heard of email?

Oh yes, everyone must be there in person because it’s critical they hear it directly (so you can bill us $5000 for a 30 minute call).

Of course. In the past. Now. And long into the future.

It's vastly easier to project a convincing illusion than it is to sustain a reality. Self interested, shrewd people will always put their energy into the illusion. Illusions give you massive leverage. Reality grinds you down.

And the conscientious and the passionate burn their energies to actually help the magicians cast their shabby spells.

I think one important takeaway is also: A good, motivated team will make it work. For example we need to cover 0800 - 1800 due to SLAs, but usually we have 2 guys just organizing Kita (kindergarten) duty with their wifes. One brings his kids to the Kita in the morning and comes in at around 0900, and the other guy comes in early and leaves at 1700ish to collect the kids. Simple.

We also had this when our application just went into a royal meltdown earlier this year and we had pretty much constant OOH work to do. Eventually we arranged that I don't come into the office for a week or more, and I'll just work reduced night hours. This allowed us to tackle that mayhem much more effectively - they'd figure out issues and create patches and manual tasks. I'd apply them overnight, and hand them everything that caught on fire this time. I don't like to work at night, but I'm the guy without ties and who's gonna complain about 20 - 25 hour weeks?

'...people, who in her terminology were “passing” as workaholics, received performance reviews that were as strong as their hyper-ambitious colleagues.'

This is the takeaway from the article. Hours worked != delivered value. One of many reasons I've always steered consulting engagements towards another compensation model, e.g. weekly retainer fees.

"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 for saying this. But in fact it's just consensus advice (and of course: there are good reasons to think it).

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)?

The interesting data points are always the outliers, not the averages.

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

Having worked in one of these businesses - I would have been classified as a “faker” - but that is the wrong way to interpret it, if you are: inefficient, can’t prioritize/identify what’s really important, can’t make yourself available with a cheery attitude after hours/weekends, and can’t manage expectations, these jobs are killer

If you can, it’s very plausible to work a 55ish hour week (excluding the occasional hell weeks) with the same if not better work product and great client and employer satisfaction

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.

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.

Having worked longer than 80 hour weeks for years at a time at full productivity I know it is possible for at least some people. The issue for me was not one of fatigue, but of a slow corruption of my perception of reality. The longer I worked at this pace the worse my ability to differentiate important from unimportant became and I made some very "interesting" decisions during that time.

I still work more 40 hours a week, but nowhere near the level I did in the past.

The first guy who trained me as a software consultant said that estimates are generally laughably incorrect, because you just never know what you will run into. Software (and technology in general) is about hiding complexity. As soon as you start to dig into complexity, you have no idea what you're going to get. But that's not really a pleasant concept to a businessperson who is trying (perfectly reasonably) to predict cleanly and clearly what something will cost so that they can gauge their ROI. So what happens is that everybody bids on a job, some people will massivley lowball their estimate to win work, and then a year or two later another company will get called in to clean up whatever mess the lowballer made. So it goes.

No, it is a constant issue in software. Business people want to know upfront how much it will cost. It makes budgeting very easy. Unfortunately if the project is anything non-trivial it is impossible to know up front how long it will take.

Business works great making the Model T Ford on an assembly line. A small improvement to the assembly line will cost X and result in Y more cars being built. If you need to make more cars it costs N to make a whole new line. All easy to budget for and the business becomes easy - no surprises, not failed projects. Of course as Henry Ford discovered the hard way (apparently more than once) eventually your competition will invest in something a little more open ended that will produce results.

I don’t know if you’re strange, but you aren’t somebody whom I would award a consulting contract to at a big company.

The usual model is to budget 3-5x the actual requirements, filling it with knowledge transfer and other complete the work you can accomplish yourself as early as possible and and milk as long as possible.

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.

Not everyone works the same way. For example, consensus is that you should have at least 8 hours a sleep at night. A fairly large chunk of 'successful' people need &/or get a lot less than that. If I try that kind of schedule I am a zombie within a few days.

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?

> 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.)

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.

I feel working in an executive role, where most of the day goes into meetings is easier than working for the same time in a technical role.

I do not think it is possible to work in a software only role for 80 hrs/week productively. That that's just me.

"under what conditions is the consensus opinion wrong"

Someone I read suggested (specifically regarding Musk), it's a productive state of hypomania, that isn't full-blown mania.