I don't believe anyone really does 80 hours. I just don't think it is possible and I don't think you can call sitting at a desk doing nothing "work".
I've done 60 hours during intense periods just fine... but it was only effective because of the nature of the work I was doing at the time. And, I usually took a break down the road to compensate. In no way was it even 50% creative work.
4 to 6 creative hours seems right, but a lot of work isn't creative. There is also the bullshit work that still has to get done, ie, loading up contacts in a CRM, building and nurturing relationships, reviewing emails, checking links, etc etc etc..
Most of my work weeks clock in around 50-60 hours regularly. It's pretty simple how this happens. It's meetings all day and then once meetings are over it's email, documents, admin paperwork, training etc...
Here's an example of just last Thursday which was busy but was at least not double booked and had some times I could stop and go to the bathroom, I also wasn't traveling this day which was good:
8-12 - US Senate Staff Delegation and budget review
12-1 - Software Requisition Review
1-2 - Infrastructure planning meeting
2-3 - Conference call with colleague in HI
3-4 - Meeting with an LP
4-5 - Talking with my Deputy and Admin
5-7 - Meeting with Army Futures
7 - Dinner
8-10 - Emails, Award review for employees, look over presentations due in Jan/Feb
Now, almost none of that work is creative because I'm not in a creative job anymore really. I am an executive with a 200 person data engineering and data science team building the future way the DoD builds and runs software.
That's how you get to these hours.
I'd also suggest that "Building and nurturing relationships" isn't "Bullshit work."
You can also get hours like that by working multiple low-level service or industrial jobs, or working a lot of overtime at a job that pays overtime. I have known people to do both, and the only thing that really limits it is the cost to your personal life and basic maintenance (relationships, health, home repair, that kind of stuff.) Men with a stay at home wife who is good at managing the home and keeping up relationships can really push it for long periods of time and come out fine in the end, but it's becoming increasingly rare for families to be able to get by with only one person working.
My parents were living this lifestyle. My dad routinely worked 100+ hour weeks, often sleeping on job sites and very often traveling for work. It kinda makes me chuckle a bit when I hear people say that 'nobody can do 80 hours!' when I spent my entire formative years watching my dad and everyone he knew doing exactly that but doing much harder labor.
It really feels to me like people who say this stuff are either very young, or have had extremely limited exposure to the world outside of their bubble.
Being at work for 100 hours is different from actually putting in 100 hours of work. I have worked with people that stayed 80 hours a week, but only really worked around 20 hours on average.
If your putting around while a 4 hour script runs, you’re there but not actually working during that time.
I understand your point, but it definitely doesn't apply to the situation I was talking about. When a steel mill or nuclear test facility has to go up by a certain date, the work doesn't stop. They just cut bigger overtime checks and keep people going until the job is done. And there isn't any 'hiding' at your desk, you're either visibly working on the job site or you're not.
That's now hot manual labor works. This is the bubble described by the parent comment. You'd be very surprised by how many continuous hours people work globally.
I have done construction work. There is a lot of standing around especially with manual labor positions. Even when there are hours of pure manual labor to do that’s relative. Nobody can work full out for 8hours so you either pace yourself or swap out and take breaks.
At the extreme edge you get long haul truckers who continuously work for as long as physically possible. But, on a second by second basis it’s not particularly demanding.
I worked in restaurants and bars when I was younger, and pulled in 80-100 hours every week for a few years. When I got my first engineering job I did the same thing, trying (successfully) to learn and develop my career as quickly as I could. I’ve also gone through phases of working 60+ hours as a contractor, trying to save as much money as possible.
For me at least, doing that much productive work in a week was never very difficult, but it was only possible because I had no real responsibilities at home. I had friends, but barely spent any time with them, and I once went 5 years without taking a holiday. I wouldn’t do that again today, but for a young person trying to set themselves up in life, it makes perfect sense.
I did this when I was young, and I don't think it got me anywhere. I should have spent my 20s doing a lot surfing or something, anything really other than what I did. I should have got home at 5, and if that got me fired, whatever, got another job.
I get what you're saying, and I respect 20 year olds who want to live that way, but I personally disagree.
I had to work to support myself during college, so I was already used to the "grind". So I decided to keep up the high effort and accelerate my career while I was young.
You can have fun at any age. But investments pay off over time, so it made sense to invest in myself early. Now that I have a good career and don't have to prove myself, I can take things a little slower and have fun "surfing or something". Plus, now I have the money to actually fund my hobbies.
Pretty much the same story for me (though I dropped out of college after 3 years, and wasn’t studying anything related to my career anyhow). I also moved out of home when I was 16, and had to work evening jobs to finish high school.
But as the above commenter points out, toil by itself is useless. I found an job which gave me the opportunity to learn, so all of my toil was ultimately improving my marketable skills. I also had to use initiative to create all of my own learning opportunities in this job. When I started in that job the pay was very low, it gradually improved over a few years, but I honestly would have been fine even if it didn’t. Because when I left that company I nearly tripled my salary, and it’s been going up steadily ever since.
That’s also not to say that any of that was necessary. None of the peers I had who were around the same age as me in the beginning worked anywhere near the same amount I did. They all have comfortable careers now, and are absolutely successful. However I can now demand much more from my employers than any of them can (salary, working conditions, perks...). I simply wanted more from my career, so I invested more into it, and got a greater return.
I've seen too many people happy about overtime... I dunno, I worked 12 hour days for weeks and it was hell. Doing something on the side, anything that makes some extra cash, seems better than straight up overtime.
You usually make more per hour working overtime than you would working at a second job. 1.5x is a typical multiplier, which is not a small raise! It's also worth pointing out that not every hourly job is equally mind-numbing.
You cut out all of the overhead: no new processes, policies, and personalities to learn; the work environment is already setup, as is billing; and there’s no chance of conflict of interest concerns.
There’s also no expectation of it continuing, which is good if you don’t want to have to deal with a side project running longer than expected. That’s bad if you’re looking for a true second job but I’ve known plenty of, say, young non-Christians who happily worked on Christmas at a healthy bonus.
Overtime is a far better deal. You don't have to commute or switch environments, just continue doing what you're doing (which may not be all that bad) and make a multiplier based on far you go overtime.
Add in holidays and other shifts and some people can double their income doing overtime which would be impossible to pull off with a second job.
Do you ever feel stressed, anxious, or trapped, with such a packed schedule? And do you ever feel regret over the value you produce due to the fact that you're stretched in so many directions?
My career - I think - is heading in the same direction (though still early) and I have a severe problem internalizing every little thing and its relative yield to the business. Thankfully I only manage 3 people at a small company, but training alone has been my biggest regret because I know there is so much potential in the team that has been untapped because we haven't invested enough into training (mostly due to my ability to generate and executing training resources and exercises).
Nope, I'm at my best in days like this. I feel immensely grateful I was given the opportunity and responsibility to lead and want other people to understand how great (in many senses of the term) that responsibility is.
The days where we deep dive infrastructure problems or try and get at organizational technical problems are my favorite, but those are even longer days.
This is all cool, and I'm happy for you for your privilege and luck.
However, I'm not sure what your anecdote has to do with what Shopify's CEO is saying. Certainly your hours are not necessary, rather you (and/or your manager) just choose to do them? Or do you think your employer would be significantly damaged if you did not?
Yeah, that kind of low intensity work I could do for longer (although I'd rather not). Try to maintain the level of concentration required for non-trivial programming for more than a few hours a day though - it doesn't really work. It's the difference between a leisurely bike ride (which you could do all day) and running five miles.
I'm asking this seriously, but how much of that was actual work done? I would be pretty surprised if you said that you actually worked for entire 4 hours between 8-12.
It’s just not comparable to IC work. In each of those meetings as an exec he probably makes 1 important decision. If he didn’t make that decision correctly it could cost his org weeks or millions of dollars. That is work, but exec work is just different.
+1 to this. It's different work - though the problem solving is the same in many ways.
Think about it like this, in many of these meetings you're look at a multivariate problem with very few reference outcomes for any given decision path and you need to come up with a solution that doesn't break the other parts of the system. Sound familiar?
Depending on what kind of decision is made, dozens or hundreds of people will have to change how they work, so the cost is high and in many cases the longer you wait to make a decision the more technical debt you have etc... so time is really a factor because people are already working.
For example we needed to come to some consensus on the RPC format we were going to use because one group used JSON, another Protobuf, another XML and other organizations wanted us to use older complex formats like USMTF and UCI to be interoperable. So do we create anticorruption layers and let everyone just do whatever they want? how do we prioritize our streaming consumers and producers? Should we switch everyone to Avro? Etc... you get the idea.
Right, I completely agree, but him saying that he worked for entitreity of those 4 hours is a bit misleading imo. We all know how "efficient" these meetings are.
I don't think it's fair to suggest he was slacking or something, unless you can show that the norm is to accomplish same job far faster.
Perhaps it would be fair to say, it is easier/more natural to spend 12 hours in a day dealing with people that moving bags of coal or solving differential equations.
Those hour meetings act as a crutch that drain or energize us and falsely trick us into thinking we've done something productive.
Those 12 hours could have been spent differently to acheive the same or better results if optimized time management matters but I don't believe they do matter in this case. This person is fueled by the meeting (he leaves the meeting stronger) and by shortening his day he would never fully be in a zone.
One of the tricks to good leadership in my opinion, is running interference with my leadership or leadership from other parts of the organization, when they try and create new projects or otherwise divert resources to something that isn't a priority. It's a big part of my job to take these meetings so that the core teams delivering value don't get tasked or bogged down with them.
Meetings aren't going away, and in most cases these are requirements coming from outside of me or my team. Part of the trick of leadership is deciding what you can say a hard no to and not even engaging, what you need to do a soft no to by taking meetings (sometimes useless) in order to maintain good relationships, and then for things that are important but would cause new work, to do a lot of work at the leadership level ahead of new tasks impacting teams so that you can help them maintain their velocity.
Sounds like the exec needs less to be in those meetings and more to be aware of the agenda and high level action items from the meeting.
Or more likely to better clarify the expected outcomes with the localized manager or director and get the impactful/abbreviated action items every "Sprint".
The question IMO is not whether it's easier or harder, but whether it's more or less sustainable. That in itself is two questions:
(1) Is it sustainable in the sense that you can remain productive throughout one day?
(2) Is is sustainable in the sense that you can keep doing it day after day?
I would say the answer to (1) is generally yes. Meetings usually require continuous partial attention rather than intense focus, involve multiple people, and often have built-in breaks. All of those help to prevent the problem of an exhausted lone programmer getting stuck in the weeds for hours before they realize - usually as soon as they take a break - that they've been looking in entirely the wrong direction.
The answer to (2) depends more on the person. For a true introvert, meetings all day will be incredibly draining, and even a conference lasting a few days can be intolerable without careful energy management. For an extrovert, such a schedule can be energizing and almost infinitely sustainable.
The key here is that for certain combinations of people and tasks a schedule like that is sustainable. However, that doesn't mean it's reasonable to expect programmers can do their job at that pace sustainably. Productivity will drop and/or they'll burn out. What irks me about these conversations is that people with personalities or situations that are amenable to one kind of work schedule are looking down their noses at people with completely different personalities or situations that make it a poor fit. I don't mean that as a criticism of you specifically, but others taking the same position or making the same points have displayed an appalling lack of empathy.
I think you more or less answered your own question here - people succeed at jobs that they can sustain and I concur with that. Shitty leaders who look down on different people for their jobs are just that - shitty leaders.
One caveat I'd add is that I'm an introvert myself and initially found a lot of these meetings and especially conferences, extremely draining.
However I also realized that there were ways to make them not-as-draining. For example, don't go to a conference unless you are a speaker. That reduces the feeling that you need to approach people to make conversation, make small talk etc...
For meetings, set the expectations that there will be concrete and measurable tasks that come out of the meeting, or otherwise don't have them. Just the facts ma'am. It's surprisingly effective, and way more efficient when you cut out the BS.
Things like that I've found reduce the amount of heavy social reading, politics, etc... which are so draining to most introverts like us.
Yep sorry, I misspoke, I meant more non-creative but vital work. I just spent a day doing nothing by CRM work and data entry and used a colorful pejorative :)
I think that is how you get to 60 hours, I don't think that is how you get to 80 hours like I said.
This is a typical executive schedule. If you’re managing a global workforce, you can generally take 2am to 6am quiet hours but that’s about it. It’s not everyday but at minimum you’d usually see check-ins from Europe needing response coming in around midnight to 2am pretty much every day.
I keep seeing this but why do non-creatives count dinner, commuting and exercise as work? (You don't do all these but you put dinner there)
As a creative I find it hard to justify that, sure I did talk about work during lunch with a coworker or an ex coworker or friend but damn I was just enjoying my pork chops, that's not work!!!
Some people get paid to have original thoughts while others get paid to not have original thoughts. To me that seems like a pretty clear line. It isn't about whether the people can be creative or not, but whether they are expected to be creative at work.
It's gross because creativity is one of the fundamental properties of being human. Characterizing specific vocations or professional domains as creative or non-creative, regardless of how the industry may have boxed in the term, imbues distinct capability castes to the practitioners.
I think the word you're looking for is "incorrect".
But you're wrong actually, I'm making a very valid differentiation, bossing people around is not a creative task the people who does the thing you tell them is the creative: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_professional
I've been classified as a creative my entire professional life and I absolutely consider a work dinner to be... well... work. When I'm doing something on the company's behalf, of course it's work. There's no need to be so hostile on hn.
Do you feel as a society that we should condone working beyond dinner like like?
As I read your schedule, I think, “if this couldn’t be handled between 9-5, with a no-work break for lunch, then something is wrong here and effective decisions aren’t being made.”
I say this as someone with a similar job, the machine learning manager with several teams reporting to me, budgets in the tens of millions per year, staffing decisions, executive meetings, procurement, etc. in a large global ecommerce company, with a similar large scale mission about data driven decision making.
If myself or any of the managers or teams reporting in to me has to work past dinner or _ever_ has to work (even just looking at Slack) on weekends, that’s a massive, critical failure on my part.
Unless we make it a critical company mission level priority, this type of healthy work/life balance culture won’t happen. It has to come down from leaders through example first, especially simply stopping work after about 8 hours that fit in with the diversity of personal life needs reflected by the overall staff (not just preferences of people who don’t mind working late or have fewer obligations preventing it).
I actually think one of the most critical signs of an effective leader is _not_ working, electing to let certain work take longer than it otherwise could — and defending that decision to executives — as part of maturity in establishing a healthy culture.
Working more hours is like taking the lazy way out in some regards. It’s much harder work to build healthy patterns over time. It’s kind of similar to developing the senior engineering skill / discipline to avoid unnecessary refactoring and avoid cluttering up a set of changes with superfluous extra fixes. It takes more discipline to hold back and do it the right way.
In fact there's plenty of saying no and choosing what to let sit idle happening in my portfolio, so I concur that's just part of being a mature manager. In fact I could point to at least two places in my organization that are somewhat "idle" at the moment where I could actually put additional attention. However creating that bandwidth would break other things.
FWIW, I'm the only one on my team working these kind of hours because we're still establishing our whole organization and my roles are sundry. I also recognize it as an outlier position, so I don't expect anyone to work anything more than the 40 hour week they are being paid for.
I guess rather than talking though specifics though, it's better to ask - when is it reasonable to expect a work schedule like I describe to exist and for how long?
There's no single answer to this, but it's probably a solution to the inputs of product/business maturity, funding and number of personnel with the right skills. If any of those three are "out of balance" people will need to be putting in more work than their pay and job descriptions provide for.
I'm sure being an engineering manager at a FAANG is probably pretty reasonable from a lifestyle perspective.
1. I make my work/life balance expectations for the team explicit and actively discourage engineers and product/project managers putting in more than 40 hours. More specifically, the goal dates we set for increment deliveries assume they will not be working over those hours. If there are surges needed, I will do my best to add capacity to the teams well ahead of time and have some "floating" engineers who don't need a lot of spin up time to help with that delivery.
2. The majority of the team, aside from my deputy and some leads, don't see a lot of the work I do because it's not relevant to their teams/portfolios. I have a good staff and have built good processes, that makes sure that core teams are shielded from other parts of the organization, or even me from levying requirements that would push them beyond their work schedules.
I manage a team of 10 data analysts. My life has turned into a hell of meetings 8-5, with any gaps dedicated to 1-1s or meeting with my team. Then I do email and some of my own coding on weekends. 60 - 75 hrs per week is normal now.
Complained to my execs about it and they just gave me a retention bonus but no help.
I love my job but am going to have to quit because of this.
I have strong feelings on this and am almost afraid to post because of, I suppose, the stigma of being a hard worker. But this is what I’ve seen & experienced:
1. Hours worked & productivity are interrelated variables but they do not equal each other. So you have to explore the other variables involved in your productivity equation if you want to control effects on productivity.
2. The brain works on solving big problems even when you’re not actively focused on it. Anyone who experiences the effect of coming back to a problem they were beating their heads on for a while and quickly figured out a path forward has experienced this first hand.
3. If you’ve bought into this, then also consider that your output is solved problems. That’s what other people will see about your work. If the outcome is that you stayed at the office for 12 hours solving a problem, versus at work for 6 hours, said f this, went home, came back the next morning and worked the problem out in an hour, then what was the difference?
You kinda keyed in that a lot of work is not creative, so I think that kinda fits into this framework too. I find that doing rote work is a nice warm up or wind down block of time. So having scheduling awareness can help boost your productivity. But yeah for all of that, I’ve never been able to buy into the idea that 60/80 hour work weeks are at all a necessary idea, or a very proper one either. And this is how I’ve tried to make myself feel better that I could never personally do that kind of time, lol.
The fact is that the nature of work changes at the c level. You are no longer doing any actual work yourself. You don’t prepare specifications, do analysis or any other for of work that you might recognize from before. You won’t touch any Microsoft products yourself. Your team does this. You are responsible for hiring people to build that team for you, so even people management is delegated to a large extent.
Most of your work is being present, either in meetings or work functions. These will include breakfast lunch and dinner, and something all three on the same day.
Your main focus is communication. This work extends to working within your own departments, the company, the rest of senior management, government, share holders, banks etc.
Most of your hours are not effective. You write them off. It’s understanding that you only have 10 hours a week of effective hours out of 80 hours and making sure those hours are actually effective.Effective time will be 5 minutes in an hour most likely.
That said some people are really good at juggling all of this bs, and some people are really terrible.
We can talk about different approaches and what works and what doesn’t, but it doesn’t change the fact that the 80 to 100 hour work week is real for a lot of people in that position.
I think it's possible but probably not sustainable. Nick Winters did a 120-hour programming/game-dev workweek and filmed it so you could see if he was cheating: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0qlr22cF14
I'm also open to the possibility that might be a very small percentage of people who could do it and that I might just not be one of them.
I'm also open to the possibility that I've been conditioned to expect 40 hour work weeks and that's why I may not be able to do much more. Apparently it's common for students in China to attend school for 12 hours a day. Perhaps if I'd been raised in a similar environment it would be easier to focus for longer?
It does happen, but generally in environments that are different from the 'normal' workplace - environments that contain a sense of community, where breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and sometimes evenings and sleeping are part of the job: grad school, hospitals, fieldwork, law/consulting/IB firms, etc. It seems like the mid-decade tech ideal was to import that kind of workplace style.
And you're right, that those hours are not all 'at the desk working', but they are still most definitely working hours when you're waiting for a page, an email, or a piece of data that require immediate response at 3am.
That kind of work can be deeply rewarding (in retrospect), but is very clearly damaging if it persists for too long.
I can say I've done a few 72 - 96 hour stretches of near total wakefulness (power naps of 20-40 minutes as possible, food and caffeine available nearly any time) but there's definitely a feeling of disconnect, being separate from the senses and just floating inside my own head toward the end of those.
We're talking full up tactical exercises in the military, and a couple of critical repair scenarios here and there since.
A couple of days of near total downtime is a minimum to reset from that kind of effort, and 'normal' work for at least a week or two if possible.
I'm diagnosed with ADD and have a prescription for Ritalin/Concerta. I'm a full time programmer, and I think my sustainable "real work and focus" time is max 6 hours. Today looks more like 4.
A higher dose does not increase that time, at least for me. I'm curious how those without add/adhd are affected.
I've heard from many people that if you're legitimately on the drug the experience is totally different than if you're taking it without a brain chemistry that needs it i.e. as a study drug. I wonder if that means that people who have ADHD could possibly have different or fewer side-effects than people without, if the two groups respond so differently. Are there any large scale studies about the long term health implications of using Adderall or Vivance without having ADHD?
I’m on Adderall for ~12 years but I disagree. Although I agree with the previous commenter, I don’t think it extends my “normal” productive max. Sure, occasionally I can feel productive for an extended stretch, but usually I feel wiped out after 4-6 hours of any real effort. I just had an hour long phone call and that alone was tiring..
Any of that data is going to be mixed in with any studies on people who were (presumably) correctly diagnosed with attention disorders, because in the US, the "medication" is prescribed at triple the rate of the prevalence of the disorders: 15% vs 5%.
Additionally: being someone who was misdiagnosed, and made to feel sick for 8 years resulting in very poor appetite, increased anxiety and intrusive thoughts, and stunted physical and social growth.
I think there is something definitely to this. As a basic example, I can still fall asleep without too much trouble even after taking my Ritalin/Concerta (And I'm above the typical starting dose as well).
I can only speak for myself, but I don't even consume much caffeine anymore and still maintain 80+ hours. Between managing people, building products, meeting with clients, documentation, and more I always have something I can do that doesn't require my maximum performance at the moment.
In fact, I'd go as far as to say my personal lifestyle and habits (eating healthy, maintaining daily exercise, blah blah) are massive contributors to my having sustained this consistent output since 2012.
In my 20s I worked 80-90 hours for ... 4-6 months. It was day job, then side hustle software that I was very excited about. Now in my late 30s with kids, yeesh. Honestly it's impossible to get 40 hours in some weeks.
I think caffeine is often used for motivation during mundane tasks. Imagine working on a tedious engineering assignment like writing unit tests for a CRUD app. Over a few years it becomes a necessary lever, and at that point it is pretty close to an addiction.
Amount of caffeine consumed by a team may be an interesting proxy for how motivated employees are at a company (a small amount indicates high motivation, a medium amount indicates low motivation, and a high amount indicates either a severe lack of motivation or a high level of motivation).
You’re getting downvoted but I strongly believe coffee is a huge net negative on productivity especially in the long run.
It has two scary effects: one is it seems to sacrifice some creativity for some raw output (along with a sort of scattered and less human feel to communication).
Two is that it degrades sleep quality. Which probably means a lack of memory formation at the margin over long time periods.
These are just hunches but people on caffeine just have an attitude that’s a little off putting once you notice it. I’d love to see some big studies that focus on the long term and subtler psych effects.
Hmm, I like coffee very much but I don't really use it to get shit done as much as to open my mind to creative thinking. Perhaps I'm using it differently than most people do?
Without coffee, I will feel sluggish and sleepy all morning. With coffee, I feel alert and inquisitive. I have a rule against drinking coffee after noon, so it doesn't affect my sleep patterns.
Discovering coffee in college was really what allowed me to read things for long hours. I like the fact that it activates inquisitiveness a lot more than that it enables productivity. This is a purely subjective experience, I admit.
The reason you feel sluggish and sleepy is because of coffee (your addiction to it), along with perhaps a variety of other imbalances in your diet, sleep or exercise.
For most of my adult life I drank coffee, with occasional breaks. When I quit a couple years ago I had what felt like burnout for nearly two months. It took up to 6 months after until I really felt fine within a few minutes of waking up. And now my sleep is far easier and better.
Caffeine has a 12 hour half life. That’s incredibly long. Your body is absolutely addicted to it after just a few weeks.
Everyone is different. I am more sensitive to caffeine than most. But it’s absolutely not the case that you need coffee to have energy in the morning. Coffee is a bandaid that temporarily fixes a problem by causing imbalance elsewhere.
Decaf is wonderful though! All the pleasant taste and routine.
Also I find it funny I’m being downvoted given I’m not making scientific claims but rather hypothesis and anecdote. Too many caffeine addicts that don’t want it to be true!
Final note. Focus is easy to come by if you have two things: a good environment (quiet, natural) and an interesting problem. I think the reason why everyone is addicted to coffee in tech is similar to why hard laborers get addicted to painkillers: it gets you through the shitty parts of your job. It’s why college kids get addicted to coffee and adderall as well. You’re being forced to do something that’s far outside your interest, and often in a bad environment. Well that, and it’s fun to do a drug that has a “come up” like caffeine.
Final final note: caffeine has a very specific effect on your thinking. It’s not a debatable point it’s just true. Look at the spider web experiment. It’s makes you excited certainly, it gives you a rush, but it’s almost like a mania much like other stimulants. The weird thing is it almost doesn’t hurt so much in business because so many people do it, so your clients are often also on the same drug as you.
A lot of surgeons have 80 hour workweeks. This is especially common is smaller hospitals in rural areas. It's not all surgery, but they're definitely not sitting at their desks and doing nothing. Before regulations, it was not uncommon for some doctors to work over 100 hours because they were in such high demand.
although it should be noted that the performance problems with long work hours among physicians are known and drastic. As is the rate of drug abuse among physicians. So in a literal sense, you can do it, but physicians do it at the expense of their own health and their patients (not to their fault of course, the system is just screwed up).
Human beings are only capable of sustained attention for limited periods of time, plus they have biological needs and must navigate a physical world.
Now, if you're just talking about time on the clock, then sure- 168 hours is the limit per week. But we're talking about people doing productive, mentally demanding work. 80 hours might not be possible.
Medical residents routinely do close to 80 hours, and I would argue on average a small single digit number of those hours are unproductive. My SO is an OB resident and worked over 90 hours last week, and probably 75 of that was either in surgery, reading, studying, or giving a presentation of one form or another. About half of her weeks are above the 80 hour limit.
It's definitely possible. Just because we don't want to do it (I don't either!) or that it has negative long-term consequences doesn't mean it's not possible.
I'm aware of the legal limit and every single resident I've met has broken it at least once (really at least a couple times every quarter). The "good" programs will at least not require their residents to lie about it.
How much of that was hands-on and being on-call? Being on-premises or on-call within X minutes but allowed to do whatever including sleeping... Not exactly a match to creative work.
The extent of my knowledge is shadowing an an anesthesiologist back in my pre-med days, so take whatever I say with a grain of salt.
It is real hands-on-work. There simply aren't enough doctors who are willing to work in a small town, even though they would get paid a lot more. From what I understand, anesthesiology (and surgery) is mostly autopilot work, so there isn't that much creativity, but it still requires thinking. Usually people respond to drugs the way you expect them to, but you need to be able to handle situations where things go catastrophically wrong.
And it’s since been reviewed and maintained due to the continual finding that continuity of care is so important to health outcomes that it makes up for exhaustion.
I think the continuity of care thing is overblown. There will always be a handoff because no one can work 24/7. One way specialties such as Emergency Medicine and Critical Care (which manage the Intensive Care Units) manage this is with overlapping shifts, where for the last hour of one shift and the first hour of the next shift overlap.
Emergency Medicine and Critical Care manage to do handoffs well, as well as nursing. I strongly disbelieve that surgeons are uniquely incapable of doing handoffs.
Ive done it. It was a startup, but not explicitly a tech company. We legitimately got to work at 7:30 every day and left at 9:00 7 days a week for several weeks.
Obviously unsustainable, but easily one of the most enjoyable periods of my work life. Everybody was helping doing everybody else’s job. It was really fun.
> I don't believe anyone really does 80 hours. I just don't think it is possible
That's a weird thing to believe. I saw it all the time when I worked in finance (but I was capped at 60 hrs, which I did routinely), and it seems pretty par-for-the-course for my friends who are doctors and lawyers.
I don't think it's healthy, but it's certainly done.
I’m confused. You say you don’t believe anyone does 80 hours and then you seem to add a qualifier to define work as that which is creative or meaningful.
To your first statement, it is possible and very common in law and investment banking, so it’s easy to dispel that misconception for you. I worked in investment banking for years and there were dozens of people on my floor which was one of dozens of floors pulling 70-90 hour weeks routinely. There is some % of an 80 hour week lost in transition (sitting at a desk waiting for feedback on a book that needs to go to printing by 4am for the 8am meeting) but you have no choice but to be there and at any moment you have to be prepared to act on whatever next step is required.
To your second point: was this work deeply creative or meaningful? To me it was. Perhaps less creative than technical. As for meaning, that depends. We would routinely work on projects that had 9-figure dollar impact on companies with tens of thousands of employees. Our numbers determined the fates of thousands of employees and hundreds of thousands in their supply chains. Today I manage over 50 people, while I have a more direct human impact now than I did then, my impact today is a fraction of what it was when our teams changed the course of companies from a little Excel spreadsheet.
If you find something you love doing and can do it in the way you want, 80 hours isn't bad at all if you're otherwise unencumbered.
I did a 7 month stretch where I was working from home, on my own schedule, doing what I loved, and was doing 15-18 hour days 6 days a week (~90-100/week), while still managing to have/cook dinner and a bit of downtime with my now-wife each day, plus a full day off. It was fantastic.
Once the product was live the work shifted just so slightly from pure create/build to maintenance/improvements, going into the office a couple of days a week, and suddenly even 60 hours felt like a lot, and eventually it was just a job and I was doing 40-45.
I think it's more a matter of finding the right thing and schedule for you rather than imposing some kind of convention onto it.
I did a few years of 80 hours, but that was as a medical resident / fellow. There is a lot of creativity in medicine (especially thinking adversarially to try to reduce premature closure on a diagnosis), but even then certainly we’re not being creative for all 80 hours a week.
Agree with this. Also in medicine we can work 12hr or 24hr shifts which imo helps "stack" together more hours so it's easier to hit larger work weeks.
As an EMT some of our crew worked 1 48hr shift and then later in the week 1 24hr shift. They got paid so little ($9.25 an hour back then!) that was the only way to survive in the Bay Area was to stack your shifts and then hit time and a half after 40hrs and double time for the last 20 hrs.
I had a preceptor who worked those shifts and I had to work her schedule while she was evaluating me. It was horrific. The 48s were brutal and I was wrecked later in the week when it came time to do the 24. Those months went by in a blur and it was basically hell to get through it.
When I advanced and got to set my own schedule I just worked 1 24hr and 1 12hr and life was great. Got to do chores and errands and long hiking trips on my days off, had enough time to travel and enjoy my hobbies.
Left EMS to more of an office job because I needed to make more $$, but I miss the patients, the camaraderie, and being out in the field.
I work in IT Security. I do 2-4 pentests a week. I shouldn’t, but I work for a small firm and don’t have much control. I easily do 80 hours a week. If I don’t we don’t get enough done, we bleed clients, and I worry about clients getting hacked. I should not work 80 hour weeks, I do not think it should be possible, but I definitely work 80 hour weeks and I am not wasting time. I do web app pentests, network and infrastructure pentests, and emergency response when they need help, and that is easily an 80 hour week. Maybe 5-10 hours of that is meetings. The rest is legitimate work.
Sometimes the hard part of the job isn't the number of hours per week at a desk but the need to always be on call to deal with problems. For me, being on call leads my brain into thinking about potential problems ahead of time, so there's a low level of work-related background noise going on all the time anyway.
I can tell you that I worked 80 hours a week for several months and while it is not effective, it was "necessary" for the business to survive. I had 4-6 hours per day that were really effective (if even), the others were just there to get simple stuff done, which was necessary to meet deadlines.
Would I do it again? Absolutely not, because it is simply bad management. But I can imagine how easy it is to get stuck in such a work environment. Or people might think "when it is working once, it will work all the time". The truth is that if the deadlines and work would have been planned better it would easily be achievable in 40 hours.
The problem is that some startups are super chaotic, overpromise, underdeliver without even thinking about how long something takes.
It’s definitely possible to work 80 hrs of real work per week. I’ve done it myself. Your mistake is probably underestimating how diverse people’s values are. If you have a strong enough reason why, working non stop is fulfilling (especially when it becomes habit).
While we're valuing diversity, let's consider diversity of circumstance as well as attitudes. Working 80 hours a week is not the same for someone who's single and healthy vs. someone who is themselves disabled or who has family members who require significant care. Assuming or implying that it's only about values is exactly what makes this discussion so contentious. Many people have the "right" values but their work role or their non-work situation is not as conducive to long hours. Or maybe they've just read the actual research instead of relying on anecdata - especially cherry-picked (or outright fabricated) stories from CEOs and VCs who benefit more from others' overwork than those people do themselves. For most people, 80 hours per week is just not healthy or sustainable.
I just took a single 29-hour workday, right before a major deadline. And coming up to that, didn't have a single off day whole December, typically working from 2pm to 4am. So yeah, it's definitely possible, but really not good for anyone in the long run.
Totally agree with this. To give an example, in the months ahead of launching .app (which I was the tech lead of), I was pulling some 50-60 hour work-weeks vs a typical 40. That was exhausting and definitely the maximum I was capable of pulling (talking about actual hours of work here, not just hours spent in the office). Plus, post-launch, I took things easy for a couple months to recover.
My experience is ~4 of productive creative work per day. I can go to 6-8, but that gets drawn out to a 12-14h workday. 4h is where Im happiest and most productive. I dont force it.
I've done 60 hours during intense periods just fine... but it was only effective because of the nature of the work I was doing at the time. And, I usually took a break down the road to compensate. In no way was it even 50% creative work.
4 to 6 creative hours seems right, but a lot of work isn't creative. There is also the bullshit work that still has to get done, ie, loading up contacts in a CRM, building and nurturing relationships, reviewing emails, checking links, etc etc etc..