[bhl]

> The Codex sprint was probably the hardest I've worked in nearly a decade. Most nights were up until 11 or midnight. Waking up to a newborn at 5:30 every morning. Heading to the office again at 7a. Working most weekends.

There's so much compression / time-dilation in the industry: large projects are pushed out and released in weeks; careers are made in months.

Worried about how sustainable this is for its people, given the risk of burnout.

[alwa]

If anyone tried to demand that I work that way, I’d say absolutely not.

But when I sink my teeth into something interesting and important (to me) for a few weeks’ or months’ nonstop sprint, I’d say no to anyone trying to rein me in, too!

Speaking only for myself, I can recognize those kinds of projects as they first start to make my mind twitch. I know ahead of time that I’ll have no gas left the tank by the end, and I plan accordingly.

Luckily I’ve found a community who relate to the world and each other that way too. Often those projects aren’t materially rewarding, but the few that are (combined with very modest material needs) sustain the others.

[ishita159]

I think senior folks at OpenAI realized this is not sustainable and hence took the "wellness week".

[bradyriddle]

I'd be curious to know about this community. Is this a formal group or just the people that you've collected throughout your life?

[alwa]

The latter. I mean, I feel like a disproportionate number of folks who hang around here have that kind of disposition.

That just turns out to be the kind of person who likes to be around me, and I around them. It’s something I wish I had been more deliberate about cultivating earlier in my life, but not the sort of thing I regret.

In my case that’s a lot of artists/writers/hackers, a fair number of clergy, and people working in service to others. People quietly doing cool stuff in boring or difficult places… people whose all-out sprints result in ambiguity or failure at least as often as they do success. Very few rich people, very few who seek recognition.

The flip side is that neither I nor my social circles are all that good at consistency—but we all kind of expect and tolerate that about each other. And there’s lots of “normal” stuff I’m not part of, which I probably could have been if I had tried. I don’t know what that means to the business-minded people around here, but I imagine it includes things like corporate and nonprofit boards, attending sports events in stadia, whatever golf people do, retail politics, Society Clubs For Respectable People, “Summering,” owning rich people stuff like a house or a car—which is fine with me!

More than enough is too much :)

[ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7]

I think any reasonable manager would appreciate that sort of interest in a project and would support it, not demand it.

[alwa]

And, at least if I'm your manager, zealously defend the sanctity of your recovery time afterward.

[fsckboy]

I don't need recovery time afterward (apart from sleep), but when I'm surrounded by people who do I want some equivalent compensation, not because I feel I need it, but because I feel they are slackers (not saying they are objectively slackers, just saying that's how it feels to me). many compromises need to be made when sprinting all out, and in the aftermath what is restorative to me is cleaning up the technical debt while it's fresh in my mind and I can't understand that other people don't want to do the same thing.

[ml-anon]

This guy who is already independently wealthy chose working 16-17h 7 days a week instead of raising his newborn child and thanks his partner for “childcare duties”. Pretty much tells you everything you need to know.

[yawnr]

Yeah as someone who has a young child this entire post made me feel like I was taking crazy pills. Working this much with a newborn is toxic behavior and if a company demands it then it is toxic culture. And writing about it as anything but that feels like some combination of Stockholm syndrome, being a workaholic, and marketing spin.

Being passionate about something and giving yourself to a project can be amazing, but you need to have the bandwidth to do it without the people you care about suffering because of that choice.

[ml-anon]

>>Working this much with a newborn is toxic behavior and if a company demands it then it is toxic culture. And writing about it as anything but that feels like some combination of Stockholm syndrome, being a workaholic, and marketing spin.

i.e. Silicon Valley "grind culture".

[ec109685]

The independently wealthy part is strange, but you only live once so folks should find the path satisfies them.

As for caring for a newborn, that is the least impactful moment you have with your kids.

Seems like he made a reasonable trade-off and will be there for all their formative years.

[tptacek]

It's not sustainable, at all, but if it's happening just a couple times throughout your career, it's doable; I know people who went through that process, at that company, and came out of it energized.

[6gvONxR4sf7o]

I couldn't imagine asking my partner to pick up that kind of childcare slack. Props to OP's wife for doing so, and I'm glad she got the callout at the end, but god damn.

[maxnevermind]

I think Altman said in Lex F. podcast that he works 8 hours, 4 first one being the most productive ones and he doesn't believe CEO claiming they work 16 hours a day. Weird contrast to what described in the article. This confirms my theory that there are two types of people in startups: founders and everybody else, the former are there to potentially make a lot of money, and the later are there to learn and leave.

[datadrivenangel]

The author left after 14 months at OpenAI, so that seems like a burnout duration.

[pyman]

It's worst than that. Lots of power struggles and god-like egos. Altman called one of the employees "Einstein" on Twitter, some think they were chosen to transcend humanity, others believe they're at war with China, some want to save the world, others see it burn, and some just want their names up there with Gates and Jobs.

This is what ex-employees said in Empire of AI, and it's the reason Amodei and Kaplan left OpenAI to start Anthropic.

[fhub]

He references childcare and paternity leave in the post and he was a co-founder in a $3B acquisition. To me it seems it is a time-of-life/priorities decision not a straight up burnout decision.

[kaashif]

Working a job like that would literally ruin my life. There's no way I could have time to be a good husband and father under those conditions, some things should not be sacrificed.

[Rebelgecko]

How did they have any time left to be a parent?

[ambicapter]

> I returned early from my paternity leave to help participate in the Codex launch.

Obvious priorities there.

[harmonic18374]

That part made me do a double take. I hope his child never learns they were being put second.

[adastra22]

It's just a google search away.

[kadushka]

Many people are bad parents. Many are bad at their jobs. Many at bad at both. At least this guy is good at his job, and can provide very well for his family.

[adastra22]

If you think being good at your job is providing for your family, you've been raised with some bad parenting examples.

[achierius]

It'll be of little comfort to the kid.

[ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7]

It is all relative. A workaholic seems pretty nice when compared to growing up with actual objectively bad parents, workaholics plus: addicts, perpetually drunk, gamblers, in jail, no shows for everything you put time into, competing with you when obtaining basic skills, abusing you for being a kid, etc.

There are plenty worse than that. The storied dramatic fiction parent missing out on a kid's life is much better than what a lot of children have.

Yet, all kids grow up, and the greatest factor determining their overall well-being through life is socioeconomic status, not how many hours a father was present.

[sumeno]

This is why the children of rich people are famously well adjusted... /s

[ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7]

They were showered with assets for being a lucky individual in a capital driven society, time is interchangeable for wealth, as evidenced throughout history.

This guy is young. He can experience all that again, if it is that much of a failure, and he really wants to.

Sure, there are ethical issues here, but really, they can be offset by restitution, lets be honest.

[adastra22]

He cannot experience time with his kid again. In any case he's on a fast track to divorce rn.

[kridsdale1]

What a fabulous payout she is in for.

[adastra22]

All those wasted years.

[baggachipz]

How did they have any time to create the child in the first place?

[sashank_1509]

My hot take is I don’t think burn out has much to do with raw hours spent working. I feel it has a lot more to do with sense of momentum and autonomy. You can work extremely hard 100 hour weeks six months in a row, in the right team and still feel highly energized at the end of it. But if it feels like wading through a swamp, you will burn out very quickly, even if it’s just 50 hours a week. I also find ownership has a lot to do with sense of burnout

[matwood]

And if the work you're doing feels meaningful and you're properly compensated. Ask people to work really hard to fill out their 360 reviews and they should rightly laugh at you.

[ip26]

At some level of raw hours, your health and personal relationships outside work both begin to wither, because there are only 24 hours in a day. That doesn’t always cause burnout, but it provides high contrast - what you are sacrificing.

[antupis]

Yup, the yearly average should be that 35-45 hours per week, but sprinting is fine if opportunity is there.

[catoc]

Exactly this - if not at all about hours spent (at least that’s not a good metric; working less will benefit a burned out person; but the hours were not the root cause). The problem is lack of autonomy, lack of control over things you care about deeply. If those go out the window, the fire burns out quickly. Imho when this happens it’s usually because a company becomes too big, and the people in control lack subject matter expertise, have lost contact with the people that drive the company, and instead are guided by KPIs and the rules they enforced grasping for that feeling of being in control.

[petesergeant]

2024 my wife and I did a startup together. We worked almost every hour we were awake, 16-18 hours a day, 7 days a week. We ate, we went for an hour's walk a day, the rest of the time I was programming. For 9 months. Never worked so hard in my life before. And, not a lick of burnout during that time, not a moment of it, where I've been burned out by 6 hour work days at other organizations. If you're energized by something, I think that protects you from burnout.

[apwell23]

> You can work extremely hard 100 hour weeks six months in a row, in the right team and still feel highly energized at the end of it.

Something about youth being wasted on young.

[parpfish]

i hope thats not a hot take because it's 100% correct.

people conflate the terms "burnout" and "overwork" because they seem semantically similar, but they are very different.

you can fix overwork with a vacation. burnout is a deeper existential wound.

my worst bout of burnout actually came in a cushy job where i was consistently underworked but felt no autonomy or sense of purpose for why we were doing the things we were doing.

[laidoffamazon]

I don't really have an opinion on working that much, but working that much and having to go into the office to spend those long hours sounds like torture.

[suncemoje]

I’m sure they’ll look back at it and smile, no?

[ojr]

for the amount of money they are giving that is relatively easy, normal people are paid way less in harder jobs, for example, working in an Amazon Warehouse or doing door-to-door sales, etc.

[babelfish]

This is what being a wartime company looks like

[beebmam]

Those that love the work they do don't burn out, because every moment working on their projects tends to be joyful. I personally hate working with people who hate the work they do, and I look forward to them being burned out

[procinct]

Sure, but this schedule is like, maybe 5 hours of sleep per night. Other than an extreme minority of people, there’s no way you can be operating on that for long and doing your best work. A good 8 hours per night will make most people a better engineer and a better person to be around.

[chrisfosterelli]

"You don't really love what you do unless you're willing to do it 17 hours a day every day" is an interesting take.

You can love what you do but if you do more of it than is sustainable because of external pressures then you will burn out. Enjoying your work is not a vaccine against burnout. I'd actually argue that people who love what they do are more likely to have trouble finding that balance. The person who hates what they do usually can't be motivated to do more than the minimum required of them.

[threetonesun]

Weird how we went from like the 4 hour workweek and all those charts about how people historically famous in their field spent only a few hours a day on what they were most famous for, to "work 12+ hours a day or you're useless".

Also this is one of a few examples I've read lately of "oh look at all this hard work I did", ignoring that they had a newborn and someone else actually did all of the hard work.

[alwa]

I read gp’s formulation differently: “if you’re working 17 hours a day, you’d better stop soon unless you’re doing it for the love of doing it.” In that sense it seems like you and gp might agree that it’s bad for you and for your coworkers if you’re working like that because of external pressures.

I don’t delight in anybody’s suffering or burnout. But I do feel relief when somebody is suffering from the pace or intensity, and alleviates their suffering by striking a more sustainable balance for them.

I feel like even people energized by efforts like that pay the piper: after such a period I for one “lay fallow”—tending to extended family and community, doing phone-it-in “day job” stuff, being in nature—for almost as long as the creative binge itself lasted.

[chrisfosterelli]

I would indeed agree with things as you've stated. I interpreted "the work they do" to mean "their craft" but if it was intended as "their specific working conditions" I can see how it'd read differently.

I think there are a lot of people that love their craft but are in specific working conditions that lead to burnout, and all I was saying is that I don't think it means they love their craft any less.

[lvl155]

I am not saying that’s easy work but most motivated people do this. And if you’re conscious of this that probably means you viewed it more as a job than your calling.

[rvz]

> Worried about how sustainable this is for its people, given the risk of burnout.

Well given the amount of money OpenAI pays their engineers, this is what it comes with. It tells you that this is not a daycare or for coasters or for the faint of heart, especially at a startup at the epicenter of AI competition.

There is now a massive queue of lots of desperate 'software engineers' ready to kill for a job at OpenAI and will not tolerate the word "burnout" and might even work 24 hours to keep the job away from others.

For those who love what they do, the word "burnout" doesn't exist for them.

[cylemons]

For these prestigious companies it makes sense, work hard for a few years then retire early.