I’m currently working legit 65-70 hours per week. We have a hard stop that costs millions if we miss. It basically means 6am-6pm Monday through Saturday. I’m not as productive as when I work less but there is a net win in productivity. I don’t think I can do this for much more than a few months. I can already tell it has markedly harmed my health. Being stressed for months at a time is hard.
People like to bring up the long hours that workers in Asian countries stay in the office or workplace for to justify long work weeks in North America and Europe when needed.
In practice, they drag out their work day (eat breakfast, take showers, go to the gym, go on their phone) and don't really work significant hours in the end. Their productivity in terms of economic value produced per hour is markedly lower than most western countries. [1]
Doing real work for 65-70 hours is markedly dissimilar and very detrimental to your health. Not even sure if most people could say they could last for a few more months.
You can't. After a few solid months of 70 hour weeks you start seeing some serious health effects (blood pressure spikes, nervous system issues triggered by high levels of persistent stress, insomnia, exhaustion, etc).
This is quite a generalization. It depends on how much you value and enjoy your work. And, every person's limit is different. There exist people on both extremes.
70+ hours of sustained work per week is unsustainable, the human body largely can't handle it. SV has a lot of dumb mythology around working non-stop (i.e. Musk claiming he works 100+ hours a week), but what people usually call 70 hours is 50 hours of work and 20 hours of dicking around 'working'.
It's a generalization that the data seems to support.
Sure, there are always outliers, but in general, 70+ hours per week over several weeks to months will severely damage your health.
Note that we're talking about 70 hours of actual work. Being in the office for 70 hours but only working 50 hours is what's more common, and doesn't cause the same hit to your health.
No shade here, but how can you possibly be on HN right now? Or do you consider this kind of commenting activity to be part of your job? I consider myself to work maybe 15 hr per week, but according to my contract I work 40, and sometimes my timesheet says 60. Nonetheless, I am “on-call” quite a bit, at my own discretion.
I just can’t imagine how I could stay in deep concentration and be “legit 65-70 hours per week,” unless I was also counting chatting on HN, Slack, meals with coworkers, research...ie the things that make my actual “work” time (of maybe 15 hours per week) truly productive.
I guess it would be totally reasonable to include some of those activities as “legit work time,” but then how do you decide what is and isn’t legit? I require a lot of adjacent “down” time to provide very high-value “on” time for my company, but how could you possibly know if 20 hours spent researching something you are excited about will have any value whatsoever for your company? Should it be “billable?” This is the unsung benefit of being a salaried worker: you don’t have to concern yourself about whether your research and exploratory development is “on task” or not, you just need to bring the benefits back to your company.
I actually posted this during a change management meeting. I was required to be there despite my portion of the meeting being 10 minutes of the hour. There are varying descriptions of "work", but my day usually lines up like so:
4:30am wake up
5:30 leave
6 arrive at the office
6-9 heads down coding
9-11 status, project, and various other meetings and help/administrative work
11-12 take lunch at the desk while I code
12-2 any follow up various other meetings
2-6 more code/tech work
Or course Im not 100% utilized. Nobody is. If I were to work 8, I would have no time to actually work on the project I have deliverables due on. Meetings are toxic, but also necessary, and Im manager and technical in this role so I have to split my time. Saturdays I usually get a solid 8-10 hours of work in with few interruptions.
I don't feel badly at all for posting here during billing hours, and if anything my invoices are conservative on real hours worked.
Oh, yes, I hear you on being present for 10 min of a 1 hr meeting. Your presence is absolutely valuable for the entirety of the hour meeting, even though it’s not clear from the outset where precisely during that time those 10 min will be valuable.
I guess that’s what I mean; it’s not necessarily obvious when is work time and when is not. Even as you’re posting on HN during your meeting as you understand it is not valuable for you to be 100% “present” and it would be more valuable to explore ideas and culture on HN as you listen, so it is also true that many will be working on ideas as they eat dinner with their families, solving problems while they sleep, and planning their dependency graph during their commute. I just don’t think “hours worked” is an honest metric any more than 4 years at college shows that you were anything more than present.
Those 4 years could have been rigorous and honest and intense and valuable with a B average to show for it, or you could have been partying and have an A for your effort. Time spent might be required, but it also doesn’t matter.
A pretty good hourly rate actually. I am definitely treating this as a sprint. And for the following 2 years I have lined up 35-40hour per week work. This will allow for a significant runway when the project ends as well. I’m hoping to have 12months salary in the bank.
To be clear- what I said leaves broad room for interpretation. I am by no means at deaths door. What I meant is a few things have happened for this sprint.
1) my stress level is higher
2) focus is harder
3) easier to make poor food choices
4) fatigue sets in towards the end of the week
That said Ive made adjustments that have helped
1) plan out the week of food on sunday and prepare as much as possible
2) forced excercise in the evening for 30-60 minutes
3) hard sleep boundaries.
It will fuck up your health. Also it will set the precedent that you are okay with working crazy hours for months on end for no additional benefit to yourself. I did it, it took me a couple years to lose the extra weight I gained. Just don't do it, your health ain't worth it.
