Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by onion2k 1211 days ago
No one paying you a fixed wage will ever agree that working less hours for them is better than working more.

When I was running startups a decade ago I would regularly ask devs not to work so many hours. Grind culture was a thing, and it made our code much worse. The effect of lack of sleep and a shitty work/life balance is abundantly obvious in a PR.

3 comments

> The effect of lack of sleep and a shitty work/life balance is abundantly obvious in a PR.

It is high time more bosses understood this

Many have and it's up to devs to some degree to pick the right job honestly. Obviously you won't work at FAANG but that's more than ok for many.
Anecdotal, but as I’ve moved from a series A, to an established startup, to a unicorn, to FAANG, I’ve found myself shipping code at a lower velocity every step of the way.

At my first job I was the second contributor to a project which didn’t do PRs. If it worked, just push it. My present process is a bit more involved!

FAANG prefer inferior quality code and more LOCs per week over better code?
Zach Holman had a line to the effect of:

"A good night's sleep is the best debugging tool"

I’m happy to hear you say this, and happy that in general the grind culture of the 2010s is being left behind.

The combination of long hours, daily stimulants, and minimal planning can make for some very fast MVPs, and that’s about it. Any time I’ve been in a position where I’m burning the midnight oil to make a deadline, I’ve always looked back at the code with great regret. The “fuck it, ship it” mentality makes for some really crappy software, it’s nice that most people are coming around to this.