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Are 10-11 Hour Programming Days Feasible?
drc37 writes "My current boss asked me what I thought of asking all employees to work 10-11 hour days until the company is profitable. He read something from Joel Spolsky that said the best way to get new customers is to add new features. Anyways, we are a startup with almost a year live. None of the employees have ownership/stock and all are salary. Salaries are at normal industry rates. What should I say to him when we talk about this again?"
Seriously... I work in the game industry and on one project I worked over 100 hours a week for four months straight.
Simple as that. That's of course assuming you could get the people to agree to it in the first place.
You can do long hours for a short period in order to get a particular feature out the door (but will have to give everyone plenty of time to recover afterward). Doing long hours on an open-ended schedule is just a burn-out disaster in the making. Of course, if all the developers quit, the company expenditure is reduced...
Yeah... that project wrecked me. I had to port several hundred thousand lines of assembler all by myself for "NBA Jam" on the Jaguar. Mind you, about 75% of that was data tables which is pretty easy to port but it was still over 100,000 lines of real code as well plus implementing all the architectural changes for a new platform. I had some health issues with my liver almost failing from work stress that plagued me for about a year afterwards (i.e. yellowish eyes / jaundice) but eventually I recovered and I am fine today many years later.
Haha, I believe you just proved my point perfectly. Bosses take note!
I don't know if you want the bosses to take note on that example. In that particular case, I made the company a ton of money (at least compared to what I was getting paid) and successfully finished a game under the incredible strain of near literal death march. All it showed the company was that nearly working your employees to death can be quite profitable.
Umm... no. I was younger, naive, and very hungry to work on games. I worked my ass off for a virtual song. As I said, from the programmer stand-point, this is a very poor case to present to your bosses as an example.
As a startup founder, director, and CTO (not all at the same time, mind you) I would frequently send developers home if they weren't being productive... even if they were only there for 4 or 5 hours. Sometimes you hit a wall and no amount of staring at that screen is going to help. Why would I want to pay you to sit there and do nothing when I could send you home and you come back tomorrow refreshed and ready to tackle the problem? I rarely let anyone work more than 10 or 11 hours because my experience taught me that the quality of what is produced is *drastically* reduced during those death marches. Again... sure a team may roll out a dozen new features over an 18 hour day but how many bugs will that produce? More importantly, how demotivated will they be the next day on 3 hours of sleep? It's a vicious cycle that I never allow my teams to enter. It's all about the bottom line and to me inching a race forward is no good unless you meet the finish line. That being said, a developer who has to be sent home after 5 or 6 hours every day is completely worthless to me. You are either on-board or you are not. I don't care how or when you work as long as you produce product that is exceptional. A rule that I had at my first CTO gig was as follows: "I don't care if I ever see you in the office. If you miss a deadline without giving me sufficient advance warning I will fire you. You were hired because you are smart and a quality coder. I shouldn't have to babysit you." Works well if you have a driven team.
It really depends on the individual programmer.
This is always a worthwhile note.
I headed up a small group 4 developers. The boss, at one point, came over and noted we'd all been working our asses off and wanted to offer up a token of appreciation. I said, "I don't know. Let's find out what people would like." He didn't like the idea--he was concerned that there would be some infighting if somebody got something that was "worth more" than what someone else got. I told him, "These are all individuals who've put their individual lives on hold to get this done. They're going to want different things."
2 guys took cash. 1 guy got a very fancy new computer. And 1 guy said, "Give me an extra two weeks of vacation and let me take a month off."
My advice, in this case, would be to sit down with the people in question and see what they would like in return for 50 hour weeks and how they would like to try to do this. Would they rather do 10 hour days 5 days a week? Would they rather do 8 hour days 6 days a week? Would they like to see more in their paycheck? Would they prefer a bonus for milestones? Shares in the company? Dinners? Try to get some ideas of what people would want and take those back to the boss. Negotiate for your people and see what can be arranged.
I have worked for two companies that went down the same road. One started issuing all sorts of stock options, then they did a reverse 700:1 split and the new shares ended up going for about $3 each (originally they were as high as $38 a share before the split. At one time, during the.com boom it would have been around $2.24 million dollars in stock. After the reverse split the options were down to a total value of $257. They did re-issue new stock options at the revalued price, it was just an insult.
For seven years I worked the 50-60 hour weeks. Ended up with ulcers, heart problems, insomnia and some stress related disorders and on a laundry list of meds (I still take 12 prescriptions a day, eight years after I was finally laid off).
Seeing the doctor at the time I was taken aback when she said "just quit, no job is worth your life". It all made sense at the time, put in a few more years, exercise my options on a few million dollars and retire by age 40.
The second company just wanted more billable hours (consultant) as they could bill on the hours you put against a project. They just one day, unilaterally decided that our billable targets were set to 50 hours/week. Even working a 60 hour week you still lose hours when doing emails, phone calls, company motivational presentations and the obligatory after hour "social" get-togethers.
I tell ya, unless it is time with someone you really are in love with, after 50 hours a week the last thing you want to be doing is hanging out with the folks you work with.
Usually the folks who make these sorts of proclamations on "50 hour work weeks" have already been through a few divorces (because their job was way more of a priority than their families) and would not know what to do with their time if they were not at work. At this last company I was working a really long day, it was around 8 pm when I swung by the owners office to say good night to find him sitting there drinking Jack Daniels from a paper cup in his office. That is the type of life they wanted us to live. Only one priority in the world, work your ass off to make money for them. Not giving a damn about what your decisions mean to other people (probably why his wife dumped his ass too) and making all sorts of money so at your death you can have a viking funeral, burning on piles of $1 bills.
Tisha Hayes
The ford motor company set a 48 hour, 6 day work week because, as Henry Ford said himself, for social justice reasons but it was really to reduce an extremely high turnover rate. This wasn't the whole picture in practice though. http://books.google.com/books?id=4K82efXzn10C&pg=PA126#v=onepage&q&f=false He didn't invent the assembly line either. Ford Motors wasn't even the first to use it for auto manufacturing. Ford is not a hero. He was a CEO.
I've worked for a bunch of startups, though no Google or such that I no longer need to work. There are all kinds of people out there, and you need to be very careful not to get screwed. It's amazing still to me how rational likable people can turn into true horrors when money is involved.
So, here's what I recommend based on the very small amount of data presented. First, tell your employees that you have been asked to ask if they will work 10-11 hours per day until profitable without any stock or additional compensation. Be sure to mention the words stock and additional compensation. They will naturally, unless they are seriously whipped employees, say they would like to have either stock or more cash, but they're probably happy to work their hearts out if treated fairly. If you and your employees believe the company has a decent chance at a good future, go back to your boss and tell him the employees want stock, and that you feel it might be a good idea, and that you think you could run the team hard for a while if they all thought it was in their best interest. Also mention that if they own stock, they'll all want to work harder, even after they are profitable.
Unless your boss is a complete dick (which is actually quite common), he'll find a way to get your guys stock. Be sure to ask how many outstanding shares there are, and be prepared for the possibility that he lies about the answer. Don't be a sucker. Try to double check the number by mentioning it to another investor, board member, the CFO, or someone else who knows the truth, and judge their reaction. Do a quick estimate of the current value of the company, and figure out how many shares per hour you could by with the cash that those hours are worth. Maybe be nice and work for a discount, but don't get totally screwed.
Unfortunately, I see way too much of two kinds of people in startups. There are way too many dishonest owners and bosses who will take advantage of trusting geeks. After all, our skills are all engineering and software, not negotiation and conflict. On the other hand, there are way too many gullible geeks, and geeks who like so many beaten house wives are simply unable to grow a pair and stand up for themselves. Assuming you care about your employees, it's probably up to you to stand up for them.
Then, there's the standard compromise, which I hope you will avoid. It is very common in these situations for your boss to offer you personally a fair stock deal, so long as you can sell a crap deal to your employees. The standard way this is done is for you to be asked to claim each share is worth X, when in reality it's worth less than X/10. The way to help your employees in this case is to somehow leak how much stock is outstanding. If your employees are too dumb to guess what the stock is actually worth once they have this information, they may not deserve extra compensation. The fact that you're posting here may mean you actually care about your employees. I hope you do, and can stick up for them.
Finally, if your boss is one of those fairly common jerks who will absolutely refuse to get you stock now, but goes on and on about how much money he's going to pay you once their profitable, then consider moving to a new company. I have never in all my years in industry seen any such promise fulfilled.
I'll end with a story where I got screwed for not growing a pair. Back in 1999, I was doing some consulting for Zvi OrBach, founder of eASIC. He'd promised me 2% of his stock for access to all my source code, and he promised to keep the code confidential, etc. I delivered the code, and the next day he sent it to Romania, where of course nothing is confidential. I asked for stock certificates, and he gave all sorts of BS reasons he couldn't do it right away, but if I'd wait a reasonable period of time, he'd make it happen. He sent me to Romania to train the team to use my software, and you know what he asked me to do? He asked me to tell them to work extra hours without pay, and he told me
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
That would meanhe would have to respect research. Hell,the fucking article doesn't say that more features sell software. In fact, it says quite the opposite. It says solve a problem better than anyone else, without worrying about your competitors.It has good advice. But read it and discuss it with your boss. Especially the many paragraphs about the importance of spoiling your programmers. HEll, Sposky talks about why overtime is bad in Joel On Software.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
For those of us who don't know a lot about how to value stock, would you (or anyone) be willing in detail to explain this? I think I am not the only one who would like to learn how not to get screwed. Moreover, if the total stock count is secret, how are we to know it? (And how can we verify that we're not being lied to about how many shares there are?)
Put the company's stock ticker symbol in to Google and search. The amount returned is the value of the stock.
If the stock is not publicly traded and no value is returned, then that stock is worth nothing.
Yes, that stock may be worth something some day, but the company might as well be handing out lottery tickets.
The stock granted to non-executive employees in these situations gives you a spot at the very end of the line of people waiting to get money out of the company.
Investors are in front of you. Any new investors putting money in cut in front of you. Vendors and creditors are in front of you. Executives holding preferred shares are in front of you.
Most successful start-ups either remain private or are bought out by a larger competitor. Very very few go public. And that is pretty much the only way your stock will be worth anything.
If given the choice, take the lottery tickets.
I worked for a company once that had a strict rule of 7.5 hours per day 5 days a week. If you needed to work extra to finish something you had to get clearance from the director of development.
Their reasoning was that after 7.5 hours per day you introduce much more errors and that will increase testing and bug fixing time and ultimately the company product.
With that reasoning in mind..... 10-11 hour days will likely f-ck up any programs developed pretty badly :-)