[samoright]

90 hours/week = 18 hours/day (assuming 5-day work week). That leaves only 6 hours for other chores, travel and sleep. This is not sustainable.

So I'll assume people who can pull off a 90-hour work week work all 7 days of the week which would amount to 13 hours/day. That still leaves sufficient time for a 7-hour sleep and 4 hours of chores and entertainment.

Now, if you are your own boss where you decide the scope and the deadlines, the work is going to be fun and I can understand that you would not mind working 13 hours/day. But I don't think working 13 hours/day for a boss or a company that considers me a cost in a business transaction of buying my skills is going to be fun.

[oneneptune]

To provide an anecdote for the effect this has on your life. I worked 70+ hours minimum (106 was my "record") for 5 years and averaged 4 hours and 45 minutes of sleep per night. It was spread out over 6 days a week which made it a little easier.. but it wasn't worth it.

I couldn't keep any intimate relationship, pretty much just dated very casually over that time.

Rarely saw my family.

Saw my friends so infrequently, that I may as well have lived 2,000 miles away. It was a big event any time I saw them which was usually once every 2-3 months.

My blood pressure reached full blown hypertension levels and I needed medication.

It's not a healthy way to live and I've undoubtedly erased years from the end of my life as a result. I don't care how motivated or passionate you are about what you do, this work load isn't sustainable and will forever be a "Dark Ages" era of my own life.

[daly]

I'd need to be convinced that they had a really interesting problem, one that would keep me awake at night. I'd also need to be convinced they understand the idea that "anything we can solve by throwing money at the problem isn't a real problem". Real problems can't be solved by money and problems that can be solved by money aren't real.

You'll find at a job that a 70% productive day is outstanding. Time not lost to meetings, travel, etc. is rare. Working from home helps because it extends the work time and minimizes the interruptions. My years working from home were the most productive.

As for the 70 hours thing, I work 7 days a week. Since I have no outside constraints the term 'day' gets a bit blurry; sleep happens when it happens, eating happens between keystrokes, etc. In fact, I'm "on vacation" this week at the Outer Banks but reading a PhD thesis. My wife can't understand why I brought "work" to a beach resort. She works in medicine so this really is "escape time from work" for her.

Interesting work is its own motivation. We seem to have lost that idea somewhere. Her work is not interesting so she needs to escape. Mine is interesting and I consider not working as "lost time".

Andrew has the possibility of "interesting work" but I'm going to bet they screw it up with things like "required sensitivity training", meetings, "required plans and schedules", "interviewing new employees", "friday lunch gatherings", skip-level interviews, open-plan floor office space, investor presentations, morning standups, on-call phone coverage, skype meetings, slack interruptions, agile card games, progress reports, company security protocols, random phone calls, trip reports, trip refund paperwork, employee ratings, changing goals, offsite meetings, time tracking, parking issues, pair programming, etc. All of which are examples of time-sinks I've experienced on the job. I can't spend 3 weeks absorbing a relevant PhD thesis "between meetings". I can't write really difficult programs without huge blocks of uninterrupted time.

[foo101]

Andrew Ng mentions in the job posting that they want dirty work as well as design work to be done.

"Since we're an early stage company, you should be flexible in your tasks and do whatever is needed, ranging from dirty work like data cleaning, to high-level work like algorithm design."

[daly]

Can you hire temp work to do data cleaning? (Aka, solve it with money? with mechanical turk?). If so, don't waste my time. If the data cleaning requires judgement then that's fine. Every job has dog work. I have to chase references for the papers I read which takes days of effort. But doing it right (aka "providing quality") is important here. Quality matters.