If you want to know why he selected the features for the Cybertruck, go back 1 year when he asked the desired features on Twitter. It's crazy how many of those small looking features (like a bed for normal sized / tall people, lighting in the back) were included in all models.
>How much do you sleep per night, on average?
>ElonMuskOfficial: I actually measured this with my phone! Almost exactly 6 hours on average.
The 4 hour thing seems kind of made up by journalists for clickbait as far as I can tell from a brief google. Though he was up last night working on Starship stuff that seems quite cool https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1210649166407438336
This is not healthy or impressive, and it may be the first sign of dementia for many people.
Even if we assume the first statement is true, which is a big if, it still doesn't necessarily support the idea that working long hours is good. After all, you can't tell whether he was successful because of, or despite the long hours.
How anyone can say this with a straight face blows my mind when even in the tech vertical he has some serious competition (are we forgetting about Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, etc.), let alone actual historical figures like Henry Ford, John Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt, etc.
But when you're at the front lines, striving to create something new, you'll be competing against very motivated entrepreneurs. These entrepreneurs will often have more resources than you, and zero aversion to working weekends. In those circumstances, Tobi's lifestyle probably isn't going to cut it. When an entrepreneur is working to create that spark, it pays to be completely obsessed, sometimes for years.
Thankfully, very few of us are on the front lines struggling to launch something momentous. Tobi once was, but he was smart and surrounded by great people, and now he's in scaling mode, which seems like a much different beast. I'm grateful that he and other successful tech leaders don't force their teams to work as hard as they needed to in the early days.
I've also been pleasantly surprised about the unlimited vacation. I started late in the year, and the company isn't really busy near Christmas. But I've already taken a decent amount of vacation.
He's practically asking to put company success before personal growth. That's incredibly selfish if you ask me.
Some others, with job titles similar to him, speak of "giving 110%" and how their employees are so dedicated to the company, they gladly take on overtime and crunch and whatnot. This seems refreshingly honest to me in comparison.
Using his math, there's 35 creative hours per person per week; assuming a 5-day work week, he's _paying_ for 20 of those and leaving 15 for personal growth. Sure, some might prefer a different ratio, but at least he's acknowledging that there needs to be a balance.
You have to remember most of the people who work there can work almost anywhere. They have specifically chosen to dedicate 80% of their creative energy at Shopify.
It's an inconvenient truth, but you're not going to be able to reach the John Carmacks of the world if you're working 40 and they're working 60: https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/1210593150303031296
Anyone who thinks he would've achieved the same with far fewer hours are just kidding themselves and pulling crabs down into the bucket. Also implicit in that is Carmack being a fool for working 60, when he would've been as or more(!) effective with less? Nonsense.
Different people have different styles that work for them. Some people love to work 60+ hours and are productive doing it, others get more and better work done when they limit themselves to 40 and take time off. What works for you/Tobi/John doesn't universally work for others.
Surely it works the other way as well -- for all the stories of people who worked all night to achieve success, there are others about people who either did so and didn't win, or worse yet burnt themselves out or hurt their lives in other ways.
Everyone thinks their experience reflects an universal truth.
That's the one big error, in my opinion.
What I learned in my life is, find your individual way. Don't play other peoples games, play your own game.
Pick what you need from the system and throw the rest away.
I'm bad at standing up before 12 and even worse at working 40h a week.
I'm don't like doing the same stuff for years.
I'm bad at networking for work, most people I meet there are just boring or upsetting to me.
All these things set me up for failure, still I'm doing better than most of my friends who are better at these things by a mile.
Most entrepreneurs are just chasing money like a Leprechaun. Wherever it goes, you follow. Run, turn, grind, pivot.
Shopify has always been really focused. Moves slower than the competition in many ways. They’ve been at it for 15 years. Mostly behind the scenes, not the sexiest stuff.
When you have a simple business you don’t have to grind weekends to try and convince someone to give you more money. The business is self sustaining and profitable.
...never...
Honestly, I think about going back almost weekly. It's a fantastic company.
His goals, at least, are ambitious in a way that those of the other people you mentioned aren't (except possibly Bezos, but Bezos doesn't laser focus on this stuff the same way Musk does).
Elon is the only person to ever start four 1bn+ companies (paypal, tesla, SpaceX, Solarcity). He has/is driving innovation across multiple industries on a time scale that I don't think any of the people you mentioned can really touch, not to mention hyperloop and the Boring Company. Its not even debatable IMO.
He didn't start Tesla. He was retroactively allowed to be called founder after being in their Series A.
He didn't start Paypal. It merged with Musk's company.
He didn't start Solarcity - Tesla acquired it 10 years after it was founded.
Or Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, the guy who started the Dutch East India company, which adjusted for inflation was worth over $8.2 trillion.
Modern companies have nothing on what entrepreneurs did in the past and how much money they made. It doesn't matter how many markets Elon Musk "disrupts" nothing he can do will ever match the impact that the Dutch East India company had on the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_East_India_Company
Yeah, it's amazing what those guys could get away with back in the days of slavery and before regulation. /sarcasm
"The company has been criticised for its monopolistic policy, exploitation, colonialism, uses of violence, and slavery."
I'm pretty sure many of the today's companies would do just as well or even better if they could have their own military force and free ticket on slavery.
Granted, DEIC is in a league of its own, but it was also a state sponsored company, more akin to Saudi-ARAMCO (2T).
Rockefeller's success is attributed to his relentless pursuit of horizontal and vertical integration, not cheap labor via slavery.
I've done 60 hours during intense periods just fine... but it was only effective because of the nature of the work I was doing at the time. And, I usually took a break down the road to compensate. In no way was it even 50% creative work.
4 to 6 creative hours seems right, but a lot of work isn't creative. There is also the bullshit work that still has to get done, ie, loading up contacts in a CRM, building and nurturing relationships, reviewing emails, checking links, etc etc etc..
Here's an example of just last Thursday which was busy but was at least not double booked and had some times I could stop and go to the bathroom, I also wasn't traveling this day which was good:
8-12 - US Senate Staff Delegation and budget review
12-1 - Software Requisition Review
1-2 - Infrastructure planning meeting
2-3 - Conference call with colleague in HI
3-4 - Meeting with an LP
4-5 - Talking with my Deputy and Admin
5-7 - Meeting with Army Futures
7 - Dinner
8-10 - Emails, Award review for employees, look over presentations due in Jan/Feb
Now, almost none of that work is creative because I'm not in a creative job anymore really. I am an executive with a 200 person data engineering and data science team building the future way the DoD builds and runs software.
That's how you get to these hours.
I'd also suggest that "Building and nurturing relationships" isn't "Bullshit work."
My career - I think - is heading in the same direction (though still early) and I have a severe problem internalizing every little thing and its relative yield to the business. Thankfully I only manage 3 people at a small company, but training alone has been my biggest regret because I know there is so much potential in the team that has been untapped because we haven't invested enough into training (mostly due to my ability to generate and executing training resources and exercises).
What you’re doing is valuable and useful work, but it is a lot easier to do. Much less mentally demanding.
I think that is how you get to 60 hours, I don't think that is how you get to 80 hours like I said.
As a creative I find it hard to justify that, sure I did talk about work during lunch with a coworker or an ex coworker or friend but damn I was just enjoying my pork chops, that's not work!!!
1. Hours worked & productivity are interrelated variables but they do not equal each other. So you have to explore the other variables involved in your productivity equation if you want to control effects on productivity.
2. The brain works on solving big problems even when you’re not actively focused on it. Anyone who experiences the effect of coming back to a problem they were beating their heads on for a while and quickly figured out a path forward has experienced this first hand.
3. If you’ve bought into this, then also consider that your output is solved problems. That’s what other people will see about your work. If the outcome is that you stayed at the office for 12 hours solving a problem, versus at work for 6 hours, said f this, went home, came back the next morning and worked the problem out in an hour, then what was the difference?
You kinda keyed in that a lot of work is not creative, so I think that kinda fits into this framework too. I find that doing rote work is a nice warm up or wind down block of time. So having scheduling awareness can help boost your productivity. But yeah for all of that, I’ve never been able to buy into the idea that 60/80 hour work weeks are at all a necessary idea, or a very proper one either. And this is how I’ve tried to make myself feel better that I could never personally do that kind of time, lol.
Most of your work is being present, either in meetings or work functions. These will include breakfast lunch and dinner, and something all three on the same day.
Your main focus is communication. This work extends to working within your own departments, the company, the rest of senior management, government, share holders, banks etc.
Most of your hours are not effective. You write them off. It’s understanding that you only have 10 hours a week of effective hours out of 80 hours and making sure those hours are actually effective.Effective time will be 5 minutes in an hour most likely.
That said some people are really good at juggling all of this bs, and some people are really terrible.
We can talk about different approaches and what works and what doesn’t, but it doesn’t change the fact that the 80 to 100 hour work week is real for a lot of people in that position.
HN discussion at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6760685
I'm also open to the possibility that might be a very small percentage of people who could do it and that I might just not be one of them.
I'm also open to the possibility that I've been conditioned to expect 40 hour work weeks and that's why I may not be able to do much more. Apparently it's common for students in China to attend school for 12 hours a day. Perhaps if I'd been raised in a similar environment it would be easier to focus for longer?
And you're right, that those hours are not all 'at the desk working', but they are still most definitely working hours when you're waiting for a page, an email, or a piece of data that require immediate response at 3am.
That kind of work can be deeply rewarding (in retrospect), but is very clearly damaging if it persists for too long.
We're talking full up tactical exercises in the military, and a couple of critical repair scenarios here and there since.
A couple of days of near total downtime is a minimum to reset from that kind of effort, and 'normal' work for at least a week or two if possible.
A higher dose does not increase that time, at least for me. I'm curious how those without add/adhd are affected.
In fact, I'd go as far as to say my personal lifestyle and habits (eating healthy, maintaining daily exercise, blah blah) are massive contributors to my having sustained this consistent output since 2012.
Edit: no drug use
Human beings are only capable of sustained attention for limited periods of time, plus they have biological needs and must navigate a physical world.
Now, if you're just talking about time on the clock, then sure- 168 hours is the limit per week. But we're talking about people doing productive, mentally demanding work. 80 hours might not be possible.
Obviously unsustainable, but easily one of the most enjoyable periods of my work life. Everybody was helping doing everybody else’s job. It was really fun.
That's a weird thing to believe. I saw it all the time when I worked in finance (but I was capped at 60 hrs, which I did routinely), and it seems pretty par-for-the-course for my friends who are doctors and lawyers.
I don't think it's healthy, but it's certainly done.
To your first statement, it is possible and very common in law and investment banking, so it’s easy to dispel that misconception for you. I worked in investment banking for years and there were dozens of people on my floor which was one of dozens of floors pulling 70-90 hour weeks routinely. There is some % of an 80 hour week lost in transition (sitting at a desk waiting for feedback on a book that needs to go to printing by 4am for the 8am meeting) but you have no choice but to be there and at any moment you have to be prepared to act on whatever next step is required.
To your second point: was this work deeply creative or meaningful? To me it was. Perhaps less creative than technical. As for meaning, that depends. We would routinely work on projects that had 9-figure dollar impact on companies with tens of thousands of employees. Our numbers determined the fates of thousands of employees and hundreds of thousands in their supply chains. Today I manage over 50 people, while I have a more direct human impact now than I did then, my impact today is a fraction of what it was when our teams changed the course of companies from a little Excel spreadsheet.
I did a 7 month stretch where I was working from home, on my own schedule, doing what I loved, and was doing 15-18 hour days 6 days a week (~90-100/week), while still managing to have/cook dinner and a bit of downtime with my now-wife each day, plus a full day off. It was fantastic.
Once the product was live the work shifted just so slightly from pure create/build to maintenance/improvements, going into the office a couple of days a week, and suddenly even 60 hours felt like a lot, and eventually it was just a job and I was doing 40-45.
I think it's more a matter of finding the right thing and schedule for you rather than imposing some kind of convention onto it.
As an EMT some of our crew worked 1 48hr shift and then later in the week 1 24hr shift. They got paid so little ($9.25 an hour back then!) that was the only way to survive in the Bay Area was to stack your shifts and then hit time and a half after 40hrs and double time for the last 20 hrs.
I had a preceptor who worked those shifts and I had to work her schedule while she was evaluating me. It was horrific. The 48s were brutal and I was wrecked later in the week when it came time to do the 24. Those months went by in a blur and it was basically hell to get through it.
When I advanced and got to set my own schedule I just worked 1 24hr and 1 12hr and life was great. Got to do chores and errands and long hiking trips on my days off, had enough time to travel and enjoy my hobbies.
Left EMS to more of an office job because I needed to make more $$, but I miss the patients, the camaraderie, and being out in the field.
Would I do it again? Absolutely not, because it is simply bad management. But I can imagine how easy it is to get stuck in such a work environment. Or people might think "when it is working once, it will work all the time". The truth is that if the deadlines and work would have been planned better it would easily be achievable in 40 hours.
The problem is that some startups are super chaotic, overpromise, underdeliver without even thinking about how long something takes.
While we're valuing diversity, let's consider diversity of circumstance as well as attitudes. Working 80 hours a week is not the same for someone who's single and healthy vs. someone who is themselves disabled or who has family members who require significant care. Assuming or implying that it's only about values is exactly what makes this discussion so contentious. Many people have the "right" values but their work role or their non-work situation is not as conducive to long hours. Or maybe they've just read the actual research instead of relying on anecdata - especially cherry-picked (or outright fabricated) stories from CEOs and VCs who benefit more from others' overwork than those people do themselves. For most people, 80 hours per week is just not healthy or sustainable.
1) If I know exactly where to spend my time for the best rate of return, its likely that I'll have to spend relatively few hours achieving success.
2) For most people, the success they can achieve through just having a plain old job can be had for a mere 40 hours. Anything they want above what 40 hours can grant them should probably be done elsewhere (second job, side-hustle, etc) since the ROI will be very low for spending those additional hours at work.
3) The 80 hour week lifestyle is probably necessary for people who are still frantically doing what Felix Dennis calls "The Search", trying to build a company without the foggiest notion what people want.
See? Working long hours sometimes is not a burden, but a choice, a choice that one makes to master what they love, and to make sure they won't regret wasting their life when looking back years later. And sometimes working long hours, as long as it's voluntary, is the only way to succeed.
Some of the proponents of long term overwork argue that it is a requirement for big successes in entrepreneurship or that people must be willing to burn themselves out to 'change the world' or other such nonsense.
Working long hours on a short term basis is not evil, but there are quite a few organizations exploiting their employees in a chase for big exits that those employees will never benefit from.
If the latter, I guarantee you will have just as much regret looking back years later. The 'voluntary' part is the gray area that most seem to talk around.
So he didn't. What about his employees?
Not to imply that long hours are necessary. I think they're abhorrent. But they're also endemic. Some bosses do get away with working shorter hours while they flog their employees to work like crazy. On the other hand, workaholism at many companies tends to gets worse and worse as you gain responsibility, and some of the most insane hours are worked by those near the top.
I started incorporating this thinking into my own work schedule, and I believe it to be true. I certainly found that I grew incredibly quickly in my abilities when I started working more (as long as I was applying the hours intelligently, which is admittedly its own trick)
I think the argument can be made for doing a bit extra regularly to improve and grow. But that's not what is happening in this ridiculous hustle culture where people are burning 60-80+ hours week all year round in an effort to win the rat race by running people into the ground.
If startup founders want to work extra - let them. But when they create a culture where they expect everyone to give the same extreme amount of sacrifice and work while they stand to gain only a fraction of what those who own the capital or have power in running the companies will gain - that is something that should be fought against as vigorously as possible on every level of society - culture, law etc.
So I applaud this "virtue signaling" and call it common sense.
Years later, when you're already comfortable, have a rich network of experts and trusted past associates, have easy access to capital, have decades of experience of building businesses, and a deep understanding of an industry of two? Yeah, you don't need the long hours, you're fine.
What does the s=20 do?
Seems to be tacked on by Twitter to track the source of shares. Pretty sure the number changes by device.
If you're fortunate enough to hit product market fit without too much struggle ... and then can scale it as a regular company - good on you.
But I suggest in the early years, it's really not like that for most founders as they pivot and strife.
In the scale years, I suggest it probably could be more like that for most company employees and leadership. And FYI I think most companies are like this i.e. more or less 9-to-5, even very well known corps.
I also think this might have very much to do with the nature of the technology and the inherent competitiveness/barriers in the category: in companies wherein there's a significant number of talented individuals needed to focus - crunching happens.
For example: Pixar films. Apparently people work pretty long and hard to make production work. It involves a lot of specific talent, working together with ambiguous timelines and schedules, last minute creative changes.
Spotify seems to be the kind of company perhaps wherein the work can be spread out fairly efficiently thereby enabling not only 9-5 hours, but perhaps more importantly: no need for A+ Valley Top Talent. I know Ottawa very well and there isn't remotely enough raw, high end A+ talent and specialisation of skills to make something like the iPhone.
Spotify can be built with a large number of 'smart people' (which Ottawa has aplenty), but I'm doubtful there will ever be an iPhone or 'Toy Story' come out of Ottawa either (though I would desperately like to be wrong).
If you're salaried, and you're working extra hours regularly, all you're doing is reducing your effective hourly rate.
That said, a great work-life balance is great to strive for, just that depending on what your company does, it may or may not happen soon enough.
There’s always going to be significant differences in the business dynamics and the public pressure on Tesla and their crew was insane. Unfortunately that shit rolls downhill sometimes and it’s hard to control.
Shopify also never faced the massive and constant vitriol and naysayers from day one. It was a massive play out of the gate, not a hockey stick growth but a massive capital investment covering multiple very difficult verticles all at once from design to operations to production and managing a very expensive and risky customer lifespan and regulatory risk for every car sold. Not to downplay how hard it is to do what Shopify accomplished, which was significant and very admirable. But ultimately it’s comparing apples to oranges at a high level like that.
But I get burnt out fast when on a schedule like that, and knew I'd have some downtime with holidays and need to fill up on work to pay bills in January. Definitely couldn't sustain hours like that unless I was CEO and it was my baby then I'd be more apt to just keep going because it's a passion project.
It has spread to take over twitter and spawned articles and CEOs of large companies weighing in, and now on hacker news. Fascinating to watch where our news starts from and how it spreads
https://twitter.com/jasonfried/status/1209115637148274690
I wholeheartedly agree as well. The key to working less, while being successful is to focus on what will give you the best rate of return and not doing the things that are not useful. That is really hard to figure out initially though. But I think it gets easier as you get more experienced, as your personal value system gets better tweaked to match reality.
This applies to the company as well like Jason Fried said. The company should have clear values that are attuned to market value and it should be professionally run.
Whilst more hours certainly doesn't mean more productivity, the idea of nurturing intrinsic motivation is often omitted in discussions about working late and it's more an implicit by-product of a good working environment.
My big metric for success is currently how many hours I can spend on my bike a week while still feeding myself and providing for loved ones responsibly.
Even then, there are only going to be but so many companies that get to the kind of scale of Shopify and that was true 15 years ago, and it's true today. But there is plenty of room for new small and medium sized companies to make millions of dollars. Success doesn't always have to be at the 3 comma level.
Success is never defined
I loved what Tobi said in this tweet: https://twitter.com/simonw/status/1210622908143415297
"For creative work, you can't cheat. My believe is that there are 5 creative hours in everyone's day. All I ask of people at Shopify is that 4 of those are channeled into the company."
5 creative hours in a day absolutely matches my experience based on my own career. I can get a HUGE amount done in those 5 hours if I apply them sensibly.
For these your ROI per hour goes down, but your total ROI still goes up even after 5 or even 8 hours. Maybe not for everyone everyday, but for some people some days for sure.
I feel like the hardest skill in jobs like programming, design (or any creative jobs, to be fair) is managing your cognitive resources, understanding when to approach problems requiring particular modes of thinking and when to stop, work on something else, or learn to do nothing.
In my mid 20s I did my share of reckless 80-100h weeks—ending up with depression and health issues that took years to recover. Some days are still challenging. And, I’m just 31.
40 hours (9-6) is rough enough!
Re: Thiel, wasn't the point of that power law section meant to say that each founder should focus on what gives them leverage? I don't recall correctly.
"The Search" is the discovery of those things outside of your normal circles of concern, which makes it doubly-difficult to find _on purpose_. Felix Dennis describes the process more akin to an aware predator waiting for something to enter its kill-zone.
That's definitely true of the Bay Area, but Shopify is an Ottawa, Canada company. Having gone to college there, I don't get the feeling that Tobi is doing anything out of the ordinary for an Ottawa company. That may not be the case in Kitchener/Waterloo or Vancouver -- and it's definitely not true of the Bay Area -- but it's much less endemic out there.
It's at once nice to see but also frustrating because I feel like Ottawa tends to lack that drive, motivation and commitment broadly speaking to develop more Shopify-type companies. There's IBM, Mitel, Adobe, Blackberry, Corel and a bunch of companies selling into government out there from a tech perspective. But hey, hopefully Shopify leads the way here and we see more of them.
Shopify is something of a point of pride for Ottawa and I do wish them all the best!
What does it mean to "work hard" at a white collar job when you don't work long hours?
Honestly curious.
> For creative work, you can't cheat. My believe is that there are 5 creative hours in everyone's day. All I ask of people at Shopify is that 4 of those are channeled into the company.
Obviously Shopify has thousands of employees now, there's very real chance that Tobi's perception does not match the reality of the employees.
The one distinction I find important is between working long hours because of the nature of your situation v/s working long hours because your manager/company is exploiting you. Determining if that's the case or not is up to the worker.
But weirdly enough - the same might be said of Spotify.
In the sense that Stocholm is not the Valley and doesn't have A+ stars in many tech categories. But - because Sweden has a historical special relationship with the music industry, and Spotify requires 'smart people and a few geniuses but not tons of specialised geniuses' - Stockholm might make a better choice than the Valley.
One thing about Sweden though - they hit way above their weight in other, more classical industries. They're a small country that makes massive international brands, car companies - for gosh sakes they make the most complicated product category: Jet fighters. Mind you, not all of it, especially the engines, but making a 'Jet Figther' requires A+ players across a broad set of industrial categories, including a diplomatic corps that's deeply and efficiently embedded with industry, as many European countries have. Canada does not have this at all, and is probably last place in the OECD for this kind of economic cooperation.
There's a Twitter thread from a few years ago where a few folk collected a bunch of them, but I can't find it anymore.
https://twitter.com/tobi/status/1210242188870930433?s=20
> My believe is that there are 5 creative hours in everyone's day. All I ask of people at Shopify is that 4 of those are channeled into the company.
> Now true - some people, myself included, need a few hours to wind up and wind down for those to occur. Right now I'm procrastinating on twitter instead of writing my summit talk for instance. Reddit and HN are my siren calls.
> That's fine. We are not moist robots. We are people and people are awesome. What's even better than people are teams. Friends, that go on journeys doing difficult things.
While I'm sure they want people to do some non-creactive work - it sounds like in principle they'd be fine with 20 hours of focused creative work. Maybe a 6 hour day, to put in 4 hours of work?
The days where we deep dive infrastructure problems or try and get at organizational technical problems are my favorite, but those are even longer days.
However, I'm not sure what your anecdote has to do with what Shopify's CEO is saying. Certainly your hours are not necessary, rather you (and/or your manager) just choose to do them? Or do you think your employer would be significantly damaged if you did not?
Source:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/big-pharma-s-manu...
Additionally: being someone who was misdiagnosed, and made to feel sick for 8 years resulting in very poor appetite, increased anxiety and intrusive thoughts, and stunted physical and social growth.
Edit: I still feel tremendous pressure to work more/longer.
It is real hands-on-work. There simply aren't enough doctors who are willing to work in a small town, even though they would get paid a lot more. From what I understand, anesthesiology (and surgery) is mostly autopilot work, so there isn't that much creativity, but it still requires thinking. Usually people respond to drugs the way you expect them to, but you need to be able to handle situations where things go catastrophically wrong.
I just wish it had a night life. The expression "nothing good in Ottawa happens after 8pm" is funny because politicians mean it one way, while people from Toronto mean it the other.
It's definitely possible. Just because we don't want to do it (I don't either!) or that it has negative long-term consequences doesn't mean it's not possible.
I'm aware of the legal limit and every single resident I've met has broken it at least once (really at least a couple times every quarter). The "good" programs will at least not require their residents to lie about it.
What you realize after a while is that they are both hard, but in different ways because it's different work.
(1) Is it sustainable in the sense that you can remain productive throughout one day?
(2) Is is sustainable in the sense that you can keep doing it day after day?
I would say the answer to (1) is generally yes. Meetings usually require continuous partial attention rather than intense focus, involve multiple people, and often have built-in breaks. All of those help to prevent the problem of an exhausted lone programmer getting stuck in the weeds for hours before they realize - usually as soon as they take a break - that they've been looking in entirely the wrong direction.
The answer to (2) depends more on the person. For a true introvert, meetings all day will be incredibly draining, and even a conference lasting a few days can be intolerable without careful energy management. For an extrovert, such a schedule can be energizing and almost infinitely sustainable.
The key here is that for certain combinations of people and tasks a schedule like that is sustainable. However, that doesn't mean it's reasonable to expect programmers can do their job at that pace sustainably. Productivity will drop and/or they'll burn out. What irks me about these conversations is that people with personalities or situations that are amenable to one kind of work schedule are looking down their noses at people with completely different personalities or situations that make it a poor fit. I don't mean that as a criticism of you specifically, but others taking the same position or making the same points have displayed an appalling lack of empathy.
One caveat I'd add is that I'm an introvert myself and initially found a lot of these meetings and especially conferences, extremely draining.
However I also realized that there were ways to make them not-as-draining. For example, don't go to a conference unless you are a speaker. That reduces the feeling that you need to approach people to make conversation, make small talk etc...
For meetings, set the expectations that there will be concrete and measurable tasks that come out of the meeting, or otherwise don't have them. Just the facts ma'am. It's surprisingly effective, and way more efficient when you cut out the BS.
Things like that I've found reduce the amount of heavy social reading, politics, etc... which are so draining to most introverts like us.
YMMV
Emergency Medicine and Critical Care manage to do handoffs well, as well as nursing. I strongly disbelieve that surgeons are uniquely incapable of doing handoffs.
Think about it like this, in many of these meetings you're look at a multivariate problem with very few reference outcomes for any given decision path and you need to come up with a solution that doesn't break the other parts of the system. Sound familiar?
Depending on what kind of decision is made, dozens or hundreds of people will have to change how they work, so the cost is high and in many cases the longer you wait to make a decision the more technical debt you have etc... so time is really a factor because people are already working.
For example we needed to come to some consensus on the RPC format we were going to use because one group used JSON, another Protobuf, another XML and other organizations wanted us to use older complex formats like USMTF and UCI to be interoperable. So do we create anticorruption layers and let everyone just do whatever they want? how do we prioritize our streaming consumers and producers? Should we switch everyone to Avro? Etc... you get the idea.
Perhaps it would be fair to say, it is easier/more natural to spend 12 hours in a day dealing with people that moving bags of coal or solving differential equations.
Amount of caffeine consumed by a team may be an interesting proxy for how motivated employees are at a company (a small amount indicates high motivation, a medium amount indicates low motivation, and a high amount indicates either a severe lack of motivation or a high level of motivation).
It has two scary effects: one is it seems to sacrifice some creativity for some raw output (along with a sort of scattered and less human feel to communication).
Two is that it degrades sleep quality. Which probably means a lack of memory formation at the margin over long time periods.
These are just hunches but people on caffeine just have an attitude that’s a little off putting once you notice it. I’d love to see some big studies that focus on the long term and subtler psych effects.
Without coffee, I will feel sluggish and sleepy all morning. With coffee, I feel alert and inquisitive. I have a rule against drinking coffee after noon, so it doesn't affect my sleep patterns.
Discovering coffee in college was really what allowed me to read things for long hours. I like the fact that it activates inquisitiveness a lot more than that it enables productivity. This is a purely subjective experience, I admit.
- Staying focused on the task and cut unnecessary distractions
- Make yourself accountable and deliver what you set out to deliver
- Hold yourself to the same standards as you expect everyone else
- Be true to yourself, your beliefs and always ensure that you lead in such a way that reflects and demonstrates those values to the rest of the company
- Be smart about time management, use "uncreative" hours to get other work done
- Don't indefinitely postpone less exciting work if it is important and make it a priority to get done
- Be on time, if you schedule meetings with other people don't let them wait and value their time as much as you value your own time
- Surround yourself with other smart people and keep an open mind to ideas which differ to your own
- Control your emotions and don't make wrong choices in the moment of heat, stress or fear
- etc.
It would be really easy (especially as a founder) to not do many of these things and it takes real dedication and effort to lead by good example. I'd call that hard work.
“Working hard” looks a lot like “not not working hard”.
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=dicking%20of...
There are many ways to lose focus, and shaving the yak can be a massive time suck.
For most of my adult life I drank coffee, with occasional breaks. When I quit a couple years ago I had what felt like burnout for nearly two months. It took up to 6 months after until I really felt fine within a few minutes of waking up. And now my sleep is far easier and better.
Caffeine has a 12 hour half life. That’s incredibly long. Your body is absolutely addicted to it after just a few weeks.
Everyone is different. I am more sensitive to caffeine than most. But it’s absolutely not the case that you need coffee to have energy in the morning. Coffee is a bandaid that temporarily fixes a problem by causing imbalance elsewhere.
Decaf is wonderful though! All the pleasant taste and routine.
Also I find it funny I’m being downvoted given I’m not making scientific claims but rather hypothesis and anecdote. Too many caffeine addicts that don’t want it to be true!
Final note. Focus is easy to come by if you have two things: a good environment (quiet, natural) and an interesting problem. I think the reason why everyone is addicted to coffee in tech is similar to why hard laborers get addicted to painkillers: it gets you through the shitty parts of your job. It’s why college kids get addicted to coffee and adderall as well. You’re being forced to do something that’s far outside your interest, and often in a bad environment. Well that, and it’s fun to do a drug that has a “come up” like caffeine.
Final final note: caffeine has a very specific effect on your thinking. It’s not a debatable point it’s just true. Look at the spider web experiment. It’s makes you excited certainly, it gives you a rush, but it’s almost like a mania much like other stimulants. The weird thing is it almost doesn’t hurt so much in business because so many people do it, so your clients are often also on the same drug as you.
Those 12 hours could have been spent differently to acheive the same or better results if optimized time management matters but I don't believe they do matter in this case. This person is fueled by the meeting (he leaves the meeting stronger) and by shortening his day he would never fully be in a zone.
Meetings aren't going away, and in most cases these are requirements coming from outside of me or my team. Part of the trick of leadership is deciding what you can say a hard no to and not even engaging, what you need to do a soft no to by taking meetings (sometimes useless) in order to maintain good relationships, and then for things that are important but would cause new work, to do a lot of work at the leadership level ahead of new tasks impacting teams so that you can help them maintain their velocity.
Or more likely to better clarify the expected outcomes with the localized manager or director and get the impactful/abbreviated action items every "Sprint".
I think Tech community is quite elitist at times
I'm just pissing into the wind. Ultimately it doesn't really matter and I agree it's not worth getting offended about.
Also, the idea of "culturally not accepting" something seems gross. It's the antithesis of diversity.
As I read your schedule, I think, “if this couldn’t be handled between 9-5, with a no-work break for lunch, then something is wrong here and effective decisions aren’t being made.”
I say this as someone with a similar job, the machine learning manager with several teams reporting to me, budgets in the tens of millions per year, staffing decisions, executive meetings, procurement, etc. in a large global ecommerce company, with a similar large scale mission about data driven decision making.
If myself or any of the managers or teams reporting in to me has to work past dinner or _ever_ has to work (even just looking at Slack) on weekends, that’s a massive, critical failure on my part.
Unless we make it a critical company mission level priority, this type of healthy work/life balance culture won’t happen. It has to come down from leaders through example first, especially simply stopping work after about 8 hours that fit in with the diversity of personal life needs reflected by the overall staff (not just preferences of people who don’t mind working late or have fewer obligations preventing it).
I actually think one of the most critical signs of an effective leader is _not_ working, electing to let certain work take longer than it otherwise could — and defending that decision to executives — as part of maturity in establishing a healthy culture.
Working more hours is like taking the lazy way out in some regards. It’s much harder work to build healthy patterns over time. It’s kind of similar to developing the senior engineering skill / discipline to avoid unnecessary refactoring and avoid cluttering up a set of changes with superfluous extra fixes. It takes more discipline to hold back and do it the right way.
FWIW, I'm the only one on my team working these kind of hours because we're still establishing our whole organization and my roles are sundry. I also recognize it as an outlier position, so I don't expect anyone to work anything more than the 40 hour week they are being paid for.
I guess rather than talking though specifics though, it's better to ask - when is it reasonable to expect a work schedule like I describe to exist and for how long?
There's no single answer to this, but it's probably a solution to the inputs of product/business maturity, funding and number of personnel with the right skills. If any of those three are "out of balance" people will need to be putting in more work than their pay and job descriptions provide for.
I'm sure being an engineering manager at a FAANG is probably pretty reasonable from a lifestyle perspective.
I manage a team of 10 data analysts. My life has turned into a hell of meetings 8-5, with any gaps dedicated to 1-1s or meeting with my team. Then I do email and some of my own coding on weekends. 60 - 75 hrs per week is normal now.
Complained to my execs about it and they just gave me a retention bonus but no help.
I love my job but am going to have to quit because of this.
It really feels to me like people who say this stuff are either very young, or have had extremely limited exposure to the world outside of their bubble.
If your putting around while a 4 hour script runs, you’re there but not actually working during that time.
Some people really do work 100 hour weeks. Most people don't though.
For me at least, doing that much productive work in a week was never very difficult, but it was only possible because I had no real responsibilities at home. I had friends, but barely spent any time with them, and I once went 5 years without taking a holiday. I wouldn’t do that again today, but for a young person trying to set themselves up in life, it makes perfect sense.
I had to work to support myself during college, so I was already used to the "grind". So I decided to keep up the high effort and accelerate my career while I was young.
You can have fun at any age. But investments pay off over time, so it made sense to invest in myself early. Now that I have a good career and don't have to prove myself, I can take things a little slower and have fun "surfing or something". Plus, now I have the money to actually fund my hobbies.
There’s also no expectation of it continuing, which is good if you don’t want to have to deal with a side project running longer than expected. That’s bad if you’re looking for a true second job but I’ve known plenty of, say, young non-Christians who happily worked on Christmas at a healthy bonus.
Add in holidays and other shifts and some people can double their income doing overtime which would be impossible to pull off with a second job.
At the extreme edge you get long haul truckers who continuously work for as long as physically possible. But, on a second by second basis it’s not particularly demanding.
Yes, but you can't have the same type of fun at any age.
But as the above commenter points out, toil by itself is useless. I found an job which gave me the opportunity to learn, so all of my toil was ultimately improving my marketable skills. I also had to use initiative to create all of my own learning opportunities in this job. When I started in that job the pay was very low, it gradually improved over a few years, but I honestly would have been fine even if it didn’t. Because when I left that company I nearly tripled my salary, and it’s been going up steadily ever since.
That’s also not to say that any of that was necessary. None of the peers I had who were around the same age as me in the beginning worked anywhere near the same amount I did. They all have comfortable careers now, and are absolutely successful. However I can now demand much more from my employers than any of them can (salary, working conditions, perks...). I simply wanted more from my career, so I invested more into it, and got a greater return.
1. I make my work/life balance expectations for the team explicit and actively discourage engineers and product/project managers putting in more than 40 hours. More specifically, the goal dates we set for increment deliveries assume they will not be working over those hours. If there are surges needed, I will do my best to add capacity to the teams well ahead of time and have some "floating" engineers who don't need a lot of spin up time to help with that delivery.
2. The majority of the team, aside from my deputy and some leads, don't see a lot of the work I do because it's not relevant to their teams/portfolios. I have a good staff and have built good processes, that makes sure that core teams are shielded from other parts of the organization, or even me from levying requirements that would push them beyond their work schedules.