[yangez]

> I have a friend who brags that he busts his * 60 hours a week driving a Coca-Cola delivery truck. Congratulations, I work 35 and make twice as much as he does.

This is a straw man. The point is that if you worked 50 vs 35 hours at the same job, you'd simply get more done - even considering diminishing returns.

There's a reason many hugely successful people are notorious workaholics - see Elon Musk, Oprah, Marissa Meyer, Bill Gates, Jack Dorsey, etc. One of the simplest advantages that you can get is to just put in more hours than the next guy. No new-age "find-yourself" touchy-feely work-life balance talk will change that.

[kyllo]

See, if working extra hours at your job will actually make you rich and/or influential, or if you just plain enjoy the heck out of your job, then you have a very good reason to do it.

But I've also seen people put in 50-60 hours at a job where others put in 40 and get paid basically the same salary, without any increased possibility of promotion either. They were basically workaholics for the sake of it, or for appearances, not for any concrete benefit. I think what they got was a feeling of moral superiority for working the hardest (even though they didn't necessarily get more actual work done), as well as a sense of security that they wouldn't be the first on the chopping block when the next round of layoffs came (not necessarily true).

It's not a straw man, I know people who do this in real life. I think of it as cargo culting for career success.

[ramchip]

I work this kind of hours right now, but I think you're wrong about the motives for most people. I don't care about security (not thinking of staying in the long term, no wife/kids to support) and I see no moral superiority in working more. But I do get strong pressure from above to stay late (X is urgent, "you're not leaving the office before Y is done", team calls being scheduled after hours regularly, etc), and there's always the social pressure. It feels bad going home early when I know teammates have to stay behind to finish their stuff.

[kyllo]

Yeah, if it's just the culture of the place, then of course there is strong social pressure and guilt-tripping that compels you to stay late like the others do. If you go against an organizational culture of staying late, your coworkers will likely resent you, your boss will think you are lazy or insubordinate, and you are probably going to be the proverbial nail that sticks out and gets hammered down. Better to just put up or leave.

I was referring to cases where it isn't necessarily the norm of the organization to stay late every day, but a few people do it anyway, for their own reasons.

Another possibility--their home life sucks and they would rather be at the office anyway. Sad, but sometimes true.

[chasing]

Elon Musk, Oprah, Marissa Meyer, Bill Gates, Jack Dorsey -- these are people who have been wildly over-compensated for their time. (Not that they don't deserve what they get, but they make huge amounts of money.) They work because they want to, and if they didn't they could retire tomorrow and live like kings/queens for the rest of their lives. Odds are, you're not in this camp. And never will be.

(And sometimes I wonder: Are all of these top-tier people workaholics? Or is that a myth that's sometimes created to both justify the amount of compensation they receive and to promote workaholism in their employees? Also: Is it easier to seem like a workaholic if you've got huge piles of cash to pay other people to actualize your visions for you?)

[antitrust]

> Elon Musk, Oprah, Marissa Meyer, Bill Gates, Jack Dorsey

Not to be a cynic, but except in the case of Bill Gates, it's not clear these people were not cases of being in the right place at the right time more than any specific brilliance.

[jmduke]

It's not exactly Hacker News' oeuvre, but Oprah's story is pretty much the definition of "hustle". She climbed the ranks from radio DJ to assistant producer to assistant reporter to co-anchor to local morning show to national morning show with alarming celerity.

(I can't stand daytime television, but I think her position was won through a lot more than being at the right place at the right time.)

[chasing]

That's basically what I mean. There are so many other factors involved. "Overwork = Bill Gates" is just about as meaningful as "Dropping out of school = Bill Gates." Maybe! But probably not.

[mrweasel]

I like that, you frequently hear "You just need to work hard", never "First thing you do is drop out of school".

May Bill need to work harder because he dropped out? Without any context the "work harder" does automatically mean that you'll succeed, nor that it's worth the effort.

David Heinemeier had a beautiful talk about being happy with a million dollars, rather aiming for the billion. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY

[rbehrends]

> The point is that if you worked 50 vs 35 hours at the same job, you'd simply get more done - > even considering diminishing returns.

Not to the best of my knowledge. It is worth remembering that the 40 hour workweek was introduced by Henry Ford in 1926 not because he was a bleeding heart liberal, but in order to increase productivity. More hours don't necessarily equal more work done. [1]

For modern non-mechanical jobs, the maximum productivity threshold may be even lower. For some types of jobs, productivity can even decrease: after a certain point, programmers will write sloppier code with more defects; the additional LOCs don't help because you're now creating additional work to remove these defects.

That doesn't mean that there aren't exceptions; just like there are people who have a natural talent to identify prime numbers, there are people who can sustain a high level of productivity over a large number of hours worked.

I also note that corporate leaders operate under different constraints: for them, availability may matter more than personal productivity.

Unrelated to productivity is the health issue: Consistently working long hours is bad for your health in a number of ways [2,3].

[1] http://www.salon.com/2012/03/14/bring_back_the_40_hour_work_...

[2] http://edition.cnn.com/2011/HEALTH/04/04/long.work.hours.hea...

[3] http://edition.cnn.com/2012/01/25/health/working-overtime-do...

[ryguytilidie]

But where does that end? We decide the 8 hour work week isn't productive enough, even though worker productivity has skyrocketed, so we go to 10, then we decide 10 hour days are for socialist pussies and go to 12 hour days, then eventually we are calling people lazy for sleeping and ridiculing them for not dragging concrete blocks for a .0000001% holding Elon Musk's Mars Miner corporation. I mean at some point life has to be about being happy versus maximizing the profitability of the company you work for...

[swamp40]

Social norms are a pendulum that swings back and forth every 100 years or so. At one end is 6 hours a day or 30 hrs a week, at the other end is work/sleep/repeat. Any less and a society can't function, any more and a person will physically break.

Individually, you get the same shake every free man has had since the beginning. You climb the mountain until you don't feel like climbing anymore. Maybe you're hurt, maybe you're tired, maybe you've found a nice plateau with a wonderful view.

Meanwhile around you, above you and below you - others scamper up the same mountain.

'Twas ever thus.

[semiel]

> Any less and a society can't function

I disagree with this. There is simply less work to be done than there used to be, what with automated factories and powerful computers. We've somehow turned this into an "unemployment crisis", when by rights it ought to be a huge boon that means everyone can work less.

[prodigal_erik]

There are diminishing returns. You could easily have eight people each working a one-hour shift on an assembly line once they all know the task, but writing code that way would be absurd--they'd waste almost all the time explaining how they intend to proceed with what they only just started on.

[semiel]

That's a pretty silly strawman. It would obviously be a better idea to work fewer months out of the year, or weeks out of the month, or days out of the week. How long a single session of work is is probably the least important variable.

[yangez]

I'm not saying everyone has to work long hours. I'm just saying that the few people who do will have an obvious advantage. It's up to each person to figure out if that's what they want.

[antitrust]

Yes, but that advantage is based on appearance and not results.

That's contract to every hacker ethic I know.

[swinnipeg]

It doesn't need to end. It is "work life choice" not "work life balance.

Choosing to spend more of your time to a task will generally return a better results. Now choose your own adventure and determine where you want those results, friends/startup/employer/family/fitness or whatever else you value.

[chasing]

Also, let me point out:

Of all of the people in this country who overwork themselves, the percentage who became billionaire titans-of-industry is, for all intents and purposes, zero.

Millions (or tens-of-millions) of Americans overwork. There's one Bill Gates.

[iends]

No, but I'll overwork myself in my 20s to have 5 million in my 30s, much more achievable.

[chasing]

Maybe! But I think the savvier approach would be to learn how to create wealth without overwork. For what it's worth, I spent many years overworking, nose-to-the-grindstone, trying to make as much as possible, etc. Had a series of panic attacks. Forced myself to lay off the gas pedal and work smarter. Actually make more money now than I did then. And I'm much happier and more relaxed. And I probably do better work.

[jasonlotito]

> There's a reason many hugely successful people are notorious workaholics

I'd imagine that part of the reason they can be workaholics is that they are hugely successful people. The type of work you do plays a huge rule in how much work you can do.

Especially when you consider this:

> The point is that if you worked 50 vs 35 hours at the same job, you'd simply get more done

Is not something you can bank on.

[njharman]

> you'd simply get more done

So Fucking What?

This, you, are the problem OP is talking about. Productivity and "work" are not even close to what should be societal priorities.

[ctdonath]

Straw man indeed. Driving a truck may be about the limit of his per-hour productivity, so putting in hours is how he increases his earnings. Working smarter may net quadruple the per-hour earnings; question then is whether one is content with living on twice the income of the trucker, or whether expending more hours to net even more income is desirable. The trucker is working at his capacity (both in time and productivity per time unit), so perhaps some bragging is in order; given the productivity potential of the author, is not working the 25-hour difference laudable or squandering opportunity for earning more? It's a choice of balancing earning vs non-earning activities, and given the resources & goals of each, both may be laudable.

[MortenK]

That's a very common argument and I agree it has merit. I think though that it's extremely dependent on what kind of work you do.

For example were you to program for 50-60+ hours a week consistently, your total output would be lower than a guy who worked only 40 hours, and by quite a big margin too. It's counter intuitive, but it's rather well documented and I think a lot of hardworking folks will recognize it from own experience.

Another downside is it's easy to neglect strategic outlook, when you are overworked and thus have your tunnel vision set on operations.

[corresation]

The point is that if you worked 50 vs 35 hours at the same job

But isn't that, in many ways, the point? We need to optimize every hour of our life, because life (and in particular youth) really is short.

If I choose to spend my life cutting grass with a pair of nail clippers, I can absolutely get more done spending 60 hours versus 35 hours. But you know, I'd rather pull out the driving lawn mower. That should be all of our goals.

There's a reason many hugely successful people are notorious workaholics - see Elon Musk, Oprah, Marissa Meyer, Bill Gates, Jack Dorsey, etc.

This is cargo culting. These people are often "workaholics" because they are highly successful. And in many cases it's hard to even attribute whether it's work or pleasure, because many business heads "put in the hours" that they do because it essentially becomes their recreation: I doubt any of them lie in bed dreading going to "work".

And ultimately that is the dream of all of us, isn't it? To eventually be in a place where we are effectively choosing everything we do, and where our work is completely rewarding and self-satisfying? In no universe can you compare that to putting in more time at a job you don't enjoy.

[RHSeeger]

> If I choose to spend my life cutting grass with a pair of nail clippers, I can absolutely get more done spending 60 hours versus 35 hours. But you know, I'd rather pull out the driving lawn mower. That should be all of our goals.

That's a bit of a straw man there. Yes, you can get more done using a riding lawnmower compared to the folks using clippers. However, once you're using a riding lawnmower you can get more done by putting more hours in.

Putting more hours in just to put more hours in isn't a good thing (otherwise doing it with clippers would be an optimal solution). Putting in more hours because it lets you accomplish more is, in many cases, a good thing.

[corresation]

That's a bit of a straw man there.

It isn't a strawman, though you may be interpreting the comment in a different manner: Proudly boasting about excessive work if you haven't optimized your efforts is not something to consider an accomplishment. Yet it is absolutely common throughout the Western world.

I've always been a "slacker" in the sense that I like to live a varied life. That means when I work I accomplish the most with the least. Many, many people make no such attempt: Thinking back to coworkers back when I was an employee sort, the sorts that did the heroic hours and had the endless late nights by and large accomplished very little, because the metric that they were rewarded on -- at least in their own self-evaluation -- was effort.

So the guy cutting the grass might boast about clipping his yard with nail clippers, just as the developer talking about their 90 hour work weeks spends 88 of them surfing Reddit. This is endemic, and the result is very low productivity because the results aren't measured, the perceived effort is.

[Shivetya]

The blog post was built on a bs argument. Apples and Oranges. Desk job versus physical labor. I guess we could argue since someone who works as a developer makes more per hour than someone at McDonalds they are making better use of their time.

You pull your own hyperbole as well.

Being successful does not make you a workaholic, and being a workaholic does not make your successful. I know more than enough workaholics who are because that is exactly what they enjoy. They work sixty hours because it keeps them occupied. It fulfills them.

The blog fails for the same reason your failing, your comparing yourself to others instead of your own goals. Your goals and your ability to meet or exceed them are what matters. How someone else does that does not, never has and never will. Some do it to push themselves, far too many do it to feel superior. Both are wrong.

[corresation]

I think you will find discussions on boards like HN more fulfilling if you avoid trying to personalize every statement. I don't argue against the hard working meme for self-interest -- I'm a rather successful independent software developer / consultant, and I spent half my day today enjoying coding while lying in a hammock.

[michaelochurch]

Working twice as hard to do twice as much grunt work (especially someone else's grunt work) is a gigantic waste of time. If the boss gives a shit, he'll hire more people.

As far as I'm concerned, if I have to work more than 40 hours to earn my keep, that means the work is of marginal importance and we should really be discussing either (a) hiring more people to handle this glut of grunt work, or (b) not doing it, focusing instead on higher-yield stuff. A programmer's salary is low enough in comparison to value-add that 15 hours per week is break-even, unless the work being assigned is of unusually low importance. So a 60-hour mandate is a sign that we're making up for a lack of strategy through sheer effort, and that never works out in the long run.

On the other hand, working twice as hard to learn twice as fast (or to have twice as good an insight into what it worth working on) is a different story. That can be worth it, because it often ends up making huge differences. If you think of a skill set as an asset, the difference between 10% per year and 5% per year, taken out over 30 years, is that one portfolio does 4.32x and the other does 17.45x-- massive difference. Also, knowledge's time value is such that one might have to work hard (at least in spurts) to get and use the high-yield knowledge.

[beachstartup]

how about the guy who owns a 200 person business who lives in a giant house, has a fleet of vehicles, servants, and doesn't work that hard because he built his business over the course of 20 years?

he's rich too, you've just never heard of him because he didn't work so hard as to become famous