Ask Slashdot: Is Logging Long Hours a Recipe For Burnout or the Only Way To Get Ahead? (bloomberg.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Over the weekend, I came across this story on Bloomberg that illustrates a common dilemma that many of us face ourselves: are we sure we're working enough? From the article: "Earlier this month, venture capitalist Keith Rabois set off a Silicon Valley firestorm about what it takes to succeed. When another tech investor wrote on Twitter that working on the weekends and burning out isn't cool -- and doesn't work -- Rabois fired back. "Totally false," he said. Rabois cited icons like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Belichick as proof that dogged dedication (usually measured by long hours) was the only way to reach the top of your field. Lots of people objected to this assessment, for reasons ranging from VC privilege to its gendered implications." I was wondering where Slashdot readers find themselves in this debate.

Comments

Not to state the obvious, but

[BarbaraHudson]

Burning out is certainly a way to not get ahead. And eventually lose your job, and your career, and then everything else.

Re:Not to state the obvious, but

[Calydor]

The house burning down is not a direct result of burning out.

If you burn out, your productivity suffers. When your productivity suffers enough, you get fired. When you get fired, you stop getting money. Maybe combined with the burnout, getting fired sends you into a depression spiral. Even without depression and lingering burnout, the job market is NOT good, so it will take time to get a new job that pays anything. Without money coming in, it becomes hard to impossible to pay the mortgage, so the house goes. Without a stable address, getting a new job gets even harder. And so on.

Re:Not to state the obvious, but

[rogoshen1]

It's one thing if you have 'skin in the game', meaning it is YOUR business that you're working yourself to death over -- that's a gamble that at least has the potential for a favorable outcome. Quite another to be a worker drone, making someone else money. It's in their absolute best interest to keep the drones productive for as long as possible -- best case scenario you'll be put out to pasture aka, moved into middle management once your productivity drops off.

(More likely: you'll be laid off, and then posting in slashdot threads about how h1-b's are taking all the tech jobs)

tl;dr; treat your work for other companies as practice: learn some skills, develop contacts -- but be cognizant of the fact that your employer in truth cares very little about your success (outside of what you can do for their bottom line)

Re:Not to state the obvious, but

[Anonymous Coward]

Burning out is generally how to lose your job, career and send your life down the plughole though. If you're burned out you physically and mentally cannot work and not for any lack of trying. That means you lose your job. You can't work so can't find another. That leaves a hole in your job history and leaves you with a stigma when you can return to work which means your career is either ruined or set back massively. In the time you've been unable to work you've run up enough debts and been unable to participate in things like friendships that it means you pretty much have lost everything else too. It wrecks lives. Best to take care of yourself and avoid it.

Re: Not to state the obvious, but

[Anonymous Coward]

Nearly a century of evidence says that working more than 35-40 hours per week makes you less productive, not more. Workers get trapped in a cycle of working longer hours because they're less productive, from fatigue, to make up the shortfall in their productivity.

Re:Not to state the obvious, but

[serviscope_minor]

A bit extreme, perhaps but yeah kinda.

First you are not going to succeed like Zuckerberg or Musk. Doesn't matter how smart or hard working you are, the chance of succeeding like only the most cherry picked individuals is basically nil. The people who do get to that position are also phenomenally lucky, had skills in areas which happened to be important at the right time and were in the right place at the right time, in addition to any other attributes.

And anyway, it's only working on your own thing which will lead to that kind of success, not working for anyone else.

Hard work will certainly get you ahead to some extent, if you measure purely in career progression or money. Burnout can be recovered from too.

But really, what's the point? chances are you'll work 80 hours per week, have a thoroughly miserable time, be unable to enjoy being ahead the burn out!

Re:Not to state the obvious, but

[esmrg]

Yes yes yes. Think of all the poor coworkers who slaved away FOR those guys and will never reap the same benefits.

Re:Not to state the obvious, but

[rijrunner]

I have rarely met an engineer who has put in those hours who has "gotten ahead". In most small businesses, IT is a dead-end and there is rarely any sort of management track for an engineer. You're putting in those hours to just tread water. And, start-ups are a lottery and most people barely break even. Developers are in the same boat as most of IT in that regard also. And, in large enterprise, very few businesses have any sort of advancement that means much. You stay an engineer or become a manager - and established businesses tend to favor business or marketing in terms of management advancement.

He's identifying a small subset of survivor bias. For every name he mentioned, there are tens of thousands who got nothing for their time.

Re:Not to state the obvious, but

[ctilsie242]

Even with jobs available, it takes a lot of time and energy to handle a job change, from filling out the paperwork to dealing with the new surroundings, to finding the best way to commute there, to figuring out which co-workers to trust and which will happily throw you under the bus because they can.

Burnout sucks. You start not giving a rat's ass about your current work, get fired, and the next job, you are still just fatigued from the previous that your performance sucks, so you are likely going to get chucked from that, especially in 2-3 months when the summer hiring spree is over.

Re: Not to state the obvious, but

[Qzukk]

Not if you're a burnt-out washout.

Re: Not to state the obvious, but

[ctilsie242]

DevOps is good, but you better know the fashion program of the week. If you know GitHub Enterprise and BitBucket, but not GitLab, the interviewer will stop and show you the door. A few months ago, it was kubernates.

Traditional system admin stuff is shrinking. When I interviewed last year, companies were going whole-hog on services like Amazon Lambda, because it allowed them to fire their server and ops staff, and keep only one "IT" person -- the guy who handed out the IAM AWS accounts. Everything else was done by offshored dev houses.

Re:Not to state the obvious, but

[ctilsie242]

It also can put you in the hospital. Doing 100+ hours a week with a shitty sleep schedule likely means a craptastic diet and no exercise. This is a great recipe for major health problems, and there is a good chance that insurance won't cover any of it.

Re:Not to state the obvious, but

[olsmeister]

If you're burned out you physically and mentally cannot work and not for any lack of trying. That means you lose your job. You can't work so can't find another. That leaves a hole in your job history and leaves you with a stigma when you can return to work which means your career is either ruined or set back massively. In the time you've been unable to work you've run up enough debts and been unable to participate in things like friendships that it means you pretty much have lost everything else too.

Don't wreck your life. Get DirecTV.

Re:Not to state the obvious, but

[Kohath]

Why doesn't insurance "cover it" in this story?

Re: Not to state the obvious, but

[Anonymous Coward]

Everything else was done by offshored dev houses.

I laugh as I list those companies into my future contacts book because within 2 years, they'll be clients.

Re:Not to state the obvious, but

[aaarrrgggh]

My adage used to be "retire early, retire often." Implicit in that statement is that you work your ass of for 4-5 years, and then take a break and do something fun for a few months or a couple years. It worked pretty well for me until hitting 40 or so and owning my own business.

We all need ways to recharge, and it shouldn't be neglected.

But to TFA's question, the simple answer comes down to how your performance is measured. If it is a derivative of time then it is hard to succeed without putting in more hours. I have several extremely effective employees that barely put in 40 hours a week, and several ineffective ones who are always working late. There are also some people who need to put in more time to be effective, and some highly effective people that need to put in more time because of the workload they are taking on. It is only that last group that is really rewarded disproportionately based on hours. (The first group we work very hard to retain, but we are less likely to offer them an ownership stake in the business.)

So, focus on effectiveness and not time.

Re: Not to state the obvious, but

[Anonymous Coward]

Sitting all day then eating a big meal from a restaurant will kill you. I worked for a startup for six years that bought lunch and dinner seven days a week. Then when a Krispy Kreme opened up nearby, our manager started buying donuts every morning to try to get us to work earlier. That's when I started having chest pains. Haven't been to a doctor yet since I've had to cancel three times because of traveling for work.

Re:Not to state the obvious, but

[kobaz]

It's one thing if you have 'skin in the game', meaning it is YOUR business that you're working yourself to death over...

Yeah exactly. I've never felt indebted to any employer to work extra hours when on fixed salary. One of my old jobs had a thing where the management would 'encourage' you to not 'watch the clock' and don't go home exactly at 5. You would get dinged at your performance review if you had an exact 8 hour day for weeks on end. People who routinely put in 50+ hour weeks would get $50 walmart gift cards at the end of the month as a perk for showing such dedication. I much prefer my sanity, and those extra hours aren't worth $50.

But nowadays (and for the last 10 years), I've run my own business. It's hard, hard work, and sometimes easy peezy work depending on what's going on. Summer is my slowing down season where I can actually relax and not work so hard, but when the end or beginning of the year rolls around, everyone wants to buy systems and spend their budget so it's 12+ hour days.

I feel like I can't get any 'real' work done during the week. This is the major reason for many of the extra hours. I spend all day jumping from one hot item to the next as things come up. And then there's the usual "issue of the week" that I have to put time into one thing for the entire week. When Friday night and the weekend rolls around I feel like I can relax and casually work on all the items that I couldn't get to during the week. I can wrap up projects, develop new features, and close out tickets that were half done during the week. I close probably 60% of our tickets on Saturdays.

It's a total catch 22 with manpower. My business isn't making enough to hire a 75k/year engineer that I really need, so I'm stuck doing a lot of the work that someone else should be doing. We're not profitable enough to attract major investors to expand development. So basically I'm stuck pouring my heart and soul into 60-70 hour work weeks. But then again when things go well and I can take half my summers off, it feels worth it because when we get big enough, I can delegate.

I have gotten burned out twice in the last 10 years, working the way I do. Recently we hired a business coach to work on process management, role definitions, and reworking some parts of the business that could be delegated down to a lower wage level1 tech to free up my time. And then of course the main issue is now I need to spend a lot of my time in training for someone new, which means I need to work even more hours to catch up on my own work.

We're making progress, definitely. Having a coach is HIGHLY recommended for anyone that's been in business for too long without having everything running perfectly and it feels like it's still a wandering startup.

Re:Not to state the obvious, but

[ranton]

It's one thing if you have 'skin in the game', meaning it is YOUR business that you're working yourself to death over -- that's a gamble that at least has the potential for a favorable outcome. Quite another to be a worker drone, making someone else money. It's in their absolute best interest to keep the drones productive for as long as possible -- best case scenario you'll be put out to pasture aka, moved into middle management once your productivity drops off.

You mentioned two extremes when suggesting you should own your own business if you're going to work yourself to death. But many people fall somewhere in the middle, where they make a very good wage (lets say $150+k in the Midwest suburbs) and work 50-60 hours per week. These workers are generally not worker drones, and could probably find work elsewhere quite easily (or why else are they paid so well?). The business gets the worker's output, and the worker gets a good wage and the experience to further increase their value in the workplace.

I find myself in this situation and it seems very worthwhile to work a little more than most people but for a very sizable reward. I don't have any equity in my company but they pay me well enough for an upper middle class lifestyle with significant savings, and provide interesting projects which increase my ability and ensure I have the skill sets to make a similar wage somewhere else if I'm not needed anymore.

Admittedly this is not a situation most of the workforce has the privilege to be in, but if you are willing to put in the time (to both work smart and hard) there are ways to get ahead without starting your own business. There is much less risk and much less potential upside, but the median upside is probably better as a highly skilled employee than as a business owner. I may start my own company in the future if I find something that both excites me and that I feel I can make money at, but it won't be because I think it's the only way to make a very good living.

Re:Not to state the obvious, but

[ranton]

I have rarely met an engineer who has put in those hours who has "gotten ahead". In most small businesses, IT is a dead-end and there is rarely any sort of management track for an engineer. You're putting in those hours to just tread water.

Like most aspects of managing your career, you need to have a clear understanding of why you are putting in those extra hours. Is it because you see a rare opportunity to be part of a transformation project and/or significantly increase your skills / experience? Then it could be worth those 60 hour weeks. Is it just because your department is understaffed and you need to take support calls over the weekend? Then those extra hours will get you no where.

It's commonly accepted that business owners need to manage their company, but when you are an employee you have the same responsibility to manage your career. Make sure you are getting what you want from your responsibilities and workload. If you are then you will probably see the rewards for busting your ass. If you don't then you'll probably just continue doing grunt work until you find yourself unemployable in your 50's.

Re: Not to state the obvious, but

[AuMatar]

I can't imagine any engineer who would work for 75k/yr. That's what I made out of college 17 years ago. But ignoring that- have you considered offering substantial (partner level) equity? It's more or less the same thing as you'd get by raising capital with a vc, but you get an engaged senior level employee out of it.

Re: Not to state the obvious, but

[gweihir]

An that is just it. The first solid numbers here were researched by Henry Ford and others that are not in any way suspect of wanting to do good for their workers. They just wanted the best productivity. Working long hours is a pure act put on for show, as productivity doing it is actually lower.

Re: Not to state the obvious, but

[Anonymous Coward]

I personally was picked for my current job over other candidates with more experience because (as I was told after I was hired) I had lots of energy and showed lots of knowledge during the panel interview.

The days of the stereotypical brash IT guy are fast coming to an end, and if you don't adapt to that, then enjoy being jobless.

In other words, unskilled socialite scum like you have forced everyone out. IT was the refuge of BOFH types who spent a lifetime of study to gain the knowledge and skills and experience to excel at technical roles. Yes many neglected their social skills and sacrificed their personal lives because socializing was unnecessary until now. Until you. The problem is, once you force the BOFHs out, they have nowhere else to go. You techbro fratboys who can socialize in any role should go back to your beer blasts and leave IT to professional BOFHs. You assholes do not belong in the tech industry. Piss off.

Re:Not to state the obvious, but

[Dog-Cow]

If this is the US, the correct question is "what insurance?".

Re:Not to state the obvious, but

[Lennie]

Then there is also Japan:

http://www.hindustantimes.com/...

Re:Not to state the obvious, but

[Kohath]

91% of Americans have health coverage

Plus lots of poor people are eligible for Medicaid even though they haven't signed up. Which means as soon as they have a significant medical expense, they'll be signed up for Medicaid and Medicaid will pay for it. So they are also "covered" by Medicaid.

Sorry you believed liars who told you otherwise. You should stop believing shit that haters and agenda-pushers say.

Re:Not to state the obvious, but

[lsatenstein]

Burning out is certainly a way to not get ahead. And eventually lose your job, and your career, and then everything else.

You need to do long hours when you are building your own business. And guess what, those long hours are not normally health stressful. It may be marriage stressful.

And when your business product is final, those long hours become normal, for most entrepreneurs.
It is a wind down, where they go from 16 hr days to 14, to a day off, to 12 hours for a few weeks to finally normal 7.5 hr days. Still, many wake up early in the morning to do some work, then take the time for breakfast and commute, and follow up with a regular day ending at 6pm.

Re: Not to state the obvious, but

[segin]

They won't. They die. As is intended.

Re: Not to state the obvious, but

[RockDoctor]

So that's the last posting ever by Anonymous Coward (deceased)?

Re: Not to state the obvious, but

[RockDoctor]

Henry Ford and others that are not in any way suspect of wanting to do good for their workers.

Not that I'm a fan, in any way, shape or form, of the loathsome system of exploitation called capitalism, but Ford did do some things for his workers which were relatively good. But they were designed to rebound to his eventual benefit. I'm thinking specifically of his paying them a relatively good wage without requiring fully-apprenticed skills from them. That meant that medium-skilled people could het to earning a reasonably good wage.

But Ford's self-serving cut from this seeming generosity was that it made it possible for his workers to afford to buy their product, and for Ford's marketing department to use this cohort of blue-collar workers buying cars to present it as a new "normal".

Re:Not to state the obvious, but

[painandgreed]

I have rarely met an engineer who has put in those hours who has "gotten ahead".

There's the Amazon strategy. Get a prestigious job or at least one above what you have now, put in long hours, pad your resume, then jump ship to the better, next job before you burn out.

Re: Not to state the obvious, but

[gweihir]

Oh, Ford was in it for his own advantage, period. But Ford was also smart and understood how things work. Turns out that fully exploitative capitalism is massively sub-optimal and a domain of authoritarians, sadists and religious fuckups, while smart businessmen that want to maximize profits give their slaves both some happiness and some freedom. This is one thing modern US capitalism has never understood. They irrationally think that to maximize profits you must maximize exploitation and minimize worker happiness.

Re: Not to state the obvious, but

[dddux]

Chest pains sound bad, mate. You should see a doctor ASAP!

False dichotomy

[Anonymous Coward]

Why can't it be both?

Re:False dichotomy

[orasio]

May be both, but not in the obvious way.

Long hours mean lower productivity, but it also means you are there, in the office, pushing hard.

That is misread as "work ethic", and hard work, and productivity.

Braindead managers will think they are getting more bang for their buck by getting more than 40 hours a week, so you will be seen as more valuable than someone doing their 40 hours, no matter the results.

The thing is that braindead managers do exist, and it may be the case that you need to appeal to them to get ahead.

It happens more in large companies, old fashioned ones, or any organization not strictly focused on success, or at least where productivity is hard to measure.

Re:False dichotomy

[pr0fessor]

It depends on the business. Sometimes the focus is more on project due dates and project success than over time hours spent to meat the deadline or whether you are willing to work through a weekend to put out a fire.

Though I will agree that at a certain point most most peoples work does start to suffer. After about 10 hours in a day I start to get sloppy...

 

Re:False dichotomy

[Comrade Ogilvy]

"put out a fire" Oh, boy.

IME, half the supposedly awesome firefighters are truly great people and excellent engineers. The other half are proverbial chainsmokers who leave smouldering butts wherever they have been -- they do get a lot of practice fighting fires.

There are enough managers who cannot tell the difference that they are places where people get promotions for crap work and rushing to fix the emergencies they created, not everywhere, but they exist.

Re:False dichotomy

[orasio]

What you say has some truth, but has nothing to do with the post you replied to.
I was saying that for a certain kind of management, appearances are more important than success, so you need to look the part they expect in order to get ahead.

Of course, there are several different ways of creating value for a company. Looks like you take pride in being a firefighter. I personally don't like that line of work, and prefer to not have a need for those.
Same thing for planning. If your company meets deadlines by working OT, then all managers involved are incompetent and unreliable.

Re:False dichotomy

[jon3k]

Braindead manager here. I think that's really a misreading of the situation. What we value is people who put in the time when there's really a need (ie big deadline, critical failure, etc). If someone is working 50, 60 or more hours per week every week, I'm starting to get worried. You really don't want someone who's that committed to burn themselves out.

Re:False dichotomy

[orasio]

"when there's really a need (ie big deadline ..."

That's what I mean by "braindead". A big deadline should not translate to OT, and OT is never a good fix for bad planning.
The fact that you don't realize that is what makes you braindead.

A better thing to value is people that get the work done, regardless the means. If I have a lazy sysadmin, that writes scripts in the morning so they can play videogames all afternoon, I'll value that, because that is what drives value . Effort is worth nothing. Results are.

Re:False dichotomy

[jon3k]

That's what I mean by "braindead". A big deadline should not translate to OT, and OT is never a good fix for bad planning.

You're telling me working an extra 5 hours one week a year to meet a deadline because client requirements changed, or Suzie was out sick, or some kind of operational problem poppedup, or one of a million other unforeseen circumstances is "bad planning" ? I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree.

My thought..

[fluffernutter]

If I'm working long hours, it will be for myself thanks. Keep in mind that Zuck works long hours because he won the lottery and the project he works long hours on is actually something of his own. If a company wants to hire me then they can either appreciate me for the good work I do during my eight hour day or I will take my skills elsewhere.

Re: My thought..

[corychristison]

Basically this.

Working long hours on something you built for yourself, because you're passionate about it, is quite different from simply logging hours to try to "move up" in the corporate world.

I've been self employed basically out of high school. I work as much, or as little, as I feel I can handle that day/week.

I regularily go on blitzes where I stay up until 3-4am for days at a time while working on something exciting, but it definitely leads to burn out. That's when I take a 4 day weekend away from work if I can.

Re: My thought..

[Second_Derivative]

If a four-day vacation cures your burnout then you do not know what burnout is.

Re:My thought..

[pr0fessor]

Most people in my position are salaried but I get paid by the hour and get overtime pay. I probably average 45 hr/week where as my salaried counter parts average closer to 50-52 hr/wk. I make more than most of them not because I make more based on a 40 hour week but because they rarely work a 40 hour week.

Re:My thought..

[fluffernutter]

I'm salaried and my place of work doesn't pay OT. Yet I am expected to jump any time they need me 24/7.

Re:My thought..

[pr0fessor]

I still got called on sunday...

Convincing them to pay me hourly instead of salary wasn't even hard I just asked and they said "OK"

Re: My thought..

[fluffernutter]

What you are describing is fatigue, not burn out.

Re:My thought..

[fluffernutter]

And in my experience you need someone like me to micromanage you so that our customers are actually satisfied with your work. I may not even be able to let you speak to the customer directory because of pure lack of professionalism. So thanks for the job.

Re: My thought..

[fluffernutter]

Real burn out is caused by the conditions of your work, not the amount of work. Burn out affects your personal life. It affects you psychologically and makes you irritable to the people around you and hard to live with. It doesn't just go away unless the work conditions causing it are alleviated. It is enough to know that you must go back to work for the psychological effect to persist.

Re: My thought..

[corychristison]

Good to know. I must be doing something right then.

Re: My thought..

[Jarik C-Bol]

I thought "Burn Out" was when you fantasized about burning the building down as you drive to work.

It's a different thing when it's your business

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a different thing to slave for a company you own, and may one day reap the benefits of and to work your ass off just so the bossman can buy another supercar.

Too many hours...

[Oswald McWeany]

Too many hours and you don't produce quality of work. Studies have shown extra vacation and time away from the office INCREASE productivity.

Even if the above were not true. "Getting ahead" is not worth missing out on time with friends, family, and ..."me time". Happiness will always trump "getting ahead".

Re:Too many hours...

[Calydor]

It's the classic question all over again: Do you work to live, or do you live to work?

Re:Too many hours...

[Jason Levine]

In fact, at a certain point, you actually get negative productivity out of a worker. Sure, they might be producing, but their work will likely be so riddled with errors that you'll need a second or even a third person to check their work. At that point, you might as well just give the first person some time off. They'll come back rested and more productive that before. Yes, it's a short-term productivity dip, but you get long-term productivity gains. (Versus a "death march" scenario where you get gains in the very short term but longer term losses in productivity.)

Re:Too many hours...

[Comrade Ogilvy]

It really depends on whether quality work matters.

I believe strongly that we humans have about ~3 hours per day of very focused attention, in which we can effectively deal with genuinely difficult problems. Some people have jobs that are a hard, but even hard jobs might be such that 3 hours of strong focus intermixed with 4 hours of paint-by-numbers programming, plus an hour to handle email, and they are done for the day and have provided good value to their employer.

Some people are doing easy stuff that any intern could do after a couple days mentoring. Well, yes, you might be effective enough crunching away for 12 hours. It is because the stuff you are working on is neither difficult nor important, so turning the crank and provided mediocre quality is acceptable.

Re:Too many hours...

[Kohath]

Productivity is (work*value)/time. When you go back to work, you do the most important (most valuable) things first. So of course taking time off increases productivity because time is a smaller number.

Re:Too many hours...

[HornWumpus]

I've worked with a few where that point was the moment they were given network credentials.

Re:Too many hours...

[HornWumpus]

Six months is too long, most people are done in two, many less. Then there is the 'other half' of the death march, recovery. Many companies think 'they're smart', give people two weeks, regular hours as recovery.

At that point 100% of employees are gaming the metrics and slacking to survive. And, of course, the project managers are gaming metrics too, so no project is ever a 'failure', no matter how big a trainwreck...

What % of total corporate effort do you think is spent gaming things like 'Rank and Rate'?

Re:Too many hours...

[colinwb]

I've worked with a few where that point [negative productivity] was the moment they were given network credentials.

Many years ago a company I worked for in the UK was taken over. Most of us were made redundant, but a few were kept on to help implement a new computer system for both my former company and the company that had taken us over. I still talked with a few of my ex-colleagues who were implementing the new system, and they often complained about a manager from the other company who was in overall charge of the implementation. According to them he was a pain, interfering and making bad decisions, so one day I asked them if they thought it would be better if he retained his role without any pay or if he just sat at home and did nothing, but received his full (and probably substantial) pay: my recollection is that they unanimously opted for the latter choice. (In a previous role he'd been a Wing Commander in the RAF, equivalent to a Lieutenant Colonel in the USAF, but I'm *not* saying that managerial incompetence is typical of middling to senior military ranks.)

Bad examples

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not fair to use Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg as an example to work long hours. They also own their own businesses of which they own shares of. Business owners generally have more incentive and motivation, as it is their pet project in a sense. The average developer, working on a boring project fixing bugs, doing minor feature work, dealing with normal office annoyances, will likely get burned out doing overtime for long periods. For an interesting project with a lot of new code to architect and write, it is easy for me to work extra hours. Long death marches of bug fixes towards the end of a project sucks.

Re:Bad examples

[HornWumpus]

Feature freeze, bug fix only time blocks are your chances to recover some sanity.

The key is to record (broken design/worked around/bodged up) crap as highest priority 'bugs' and actually get them fixed, bitching is easy.

Every team member needs to 'manage the managers'. The dumber they are, the more managing they need, best to coordinate the team, make sure 'it' gets consistent bullshit. Weekly lunch among the awake suggested.

You still need to manage your own effort. Crispy you're no use to anyone, even if you can fake it.

Look at the PHB, he was likely once a decent human being, that's what faking it gets you, long term. 'Company Man' these days means you know: This is the last decent job you'll ever have.

Working Enough

[SeattleLawGuy]

Working enough is far less important than working intelligently, unless your boss is an idiot, in which case you have to be intelligent enough to recognize you have to work "enough" even if you otherwise wouldn't need to.

Re:Working Enough

[Mr D from 63]

I'd rather have employees that get their work done and go home early than those that are always working late and behind schedule. I kind of think leaving early is a nice reward for getting done early. OTOH, occasionally when work needs call for logging extra hours to meet a deadline, I expect everyone to carry their share of the load.

Re:Working Enough

[93 Escort Wagon]

Although the mantra "work smarter, not harder" is generally a lie used by incompetent managers who are trying to deflect the blame for their own mismanagement onto their subordinates.

Re:Working Enough

[ghoul]

In a previous avatar when I was a project Manager I waited for the team members to go home so I could get my creative work done as while the team is in office its mostly babysitting and unblocking - small tasks but which keep breaking your flow of thought. And I would find it very irritating when these folks would not go home either to impress me or to get the free dinner - dont know which. Basically I hated them for not going home and they though they were impressing me with long hours.
I kind of figured out I need to do a more creative job than project management and moved to consultative sales.

Re:Working Enough

[Hognoxious]

And I would find it very irritating when these folks would not go home

Surreptitiously place a book, DVD, pair of brightly coloured socks in your desk drawer. Leave. Be sure to make a lot of noise about it. Say "goodnight" to everybody at least twice.

Drive around for 15 minutes, then go back to the office.

...

Profit!!!!

Find help instead

[Kohath]

I'd say time is better spent connecting with people and finding others to help you accomplish your (hopefully mutual) goals.

Not everyone can or wants to be a leader

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm quite satisfied to work minimal hours, live comfortably, and do shit that isn't work related. Its called work/life balance. Oh, and I'm not burnt out.

Identity responses over empricial ones?

[StealthyRoid]

Really, "VC privilege" and "gender implications"? Come on. Worker productivity isn't a new field of study, there's a lot of empirical evidence (in both directions, really) that address this question. I _think_ that the literature tends to show that while burnout is a very real thing and absolutely devastating to long term productivity, occasional "crunch mode" periods can actually be very productive. Whatever the actual answer is, though, it's super depressing that people fall back on ad-hom attacks (which is essentially what all identity-based args are) vs referencing the huge body of research that exists.

Re:Identity responses over empricial ones?

[Anonymous Coward]

the problem is, too many executives think it's always "crunch time".

Re: Identity responses over empricial ones?

[Reverend Green]

I bet it's really fucking easy to hire an experienced Java developer in Seattle. If you pay an actual middle class - i.e. enough to afford a decent house - salary and abstain from the abusive labor practices for which that city is notorious.

Musk, Zuckerberg... and Belichick?

[93 Escort Wagon]

One of these things is not like the other. Just how hard does Rabois think a football coach works from February through June? A GM might be busy during the off season, but a coach has a lot of downtime.

So two tech investors disagree on a topic, yet the one who apparently pulls random names out of his nether regions is the one the writer chooses to pay attention to. Why is that?

And really, what percentage of tech startups fail? Is this moron claiming those people weren't working hard enough or long enough? Is that really why Musk and Zuckerberg are successful?

Re:Musk, Zuckerberg... and Belichick?

[Dragonslicer]

One of these things is not like the other. Just how hard does Rabois think a football coach works from February through June? A GM might be busy during the off season, but a coach has a lot of downtime.

Belichick is also the GM.

Re:Musk, Zuckerberg... and Belichick?

[93 Escort Wagon]

Belichick is also the GM.

I didn't realize that... talk about job security!

Okay, he probably does work hard year round. I have my doubts he works any harder than less successful GMs do, though.

Long hours don't help

[rsilvergun]

if you're working long hours you're doing it wrong. Identify simple repetitive tasks and either automate them or give them to junior employees. Use the time you free up for complex added value tasks. Just make sure you're adding those kinds of things to your official list of duties and that everybody knows you're doing them. Not just for recognition but so bean counters don't fire you because on paper you don't have a job anymore :). Then use the value adds to get raises until you hit your salary cap and then either a promotion or leave the company as needed. Lather, rinse repeat.

Re:Absolutely.

[Oswald McWeany]

You run too fast, you fall over, crack your head open. Spend a few weeks recovering and are now far behind.

Doing it wrong...

[gti_guy]

If you consider what you are doing is "hard work", then you are doing it wrong.

Re:Doing it wrong...

[Jason Levine]

Not necessarily. If everything you are doing is simple, then you're obviously not challenging yourself. You shouldn't have a ton of highly difficult tasks to accomplish, but a good mix of simple and hard are necessary to keep your mind sharp. (Do the hard tasks to give your brain a workout and work on the simple tasks to give your brain a rest.)

Success? Getting Ahead? Hidden assumptions.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is "success" defined as being the top in your field? Why is "reaching the top" something to be pursued?
If that's what you want, and that's what you enjoy, do it. The people I've seen get to these positions work a lot. I haven't really seen people that get to "the top" that don't. As long as you actually LIKE this, then go for it.

But here's the thing. But most people don't live to work. They work to live. It's obviously not that simple, and work can be it's own reward at times, but the people who speak out against working weekends are those that seek some sort of balance in their lives with work, and don't see it as some sort of big achievement in life. Burnout is exactly this, and realizing you squandered your time for an illusion.

Life is a balance. Few of us are doing exactly what we want. That's OK, and sort of expected. But there's this sort of Big Lie that if you "get ahead" you'll wake up some day having "made it", and you'll reach nirvana, or some wonderful state, or have some kind of great reward for all that hard work. It's bullshit. If you're not actually enjoying your life and focusing on "getting ahead" as an end rather than the activity itself, then you're just lying to yourself.

Not so black and white

[grasshoppa]

Hours to burnout isn't necessarily a valid relationship. Neither is hours to expertise, for that matter. There are far more factors to both relationships.

However, he's not entirely wrong; in order to get to the top of your field, that means a high degree of dedication and, yes, time. Can't put in an hour here and there and expect magical results. Of course, those who are at the top of their field usually love what they do, so those long hours spent in pursuit of excellence have a reduced chance to cause burnout.

Reminds me of WKRP

[mykepredko]

From the headline, I thought somebody was arguing about how much time to spend at work at a lumber camp.

From the WKRP episode where they read the personals and confuse a girl who likes "jogging" with "logging".

Wake up. No participation trophies here.

[danlor]

Not everyone gets to win marathons. Not everyone is entitled to. If you can't cut it, then you can't cut it. Deal with it.

You negotiate your own life.

You make your own life decisions and accept repercussions.

You decide what is ok and what is not for YOU. No one else.

Some people are just built and/or wired differently. They never get tired. They never burn out. They never stop. Sometimes this leads to great success. Sometimes they are lashed to a machine and die poor making others rich. Your choices make the difference. Don't blame sexism. Don't blame society. Don't blame culture. Your failings and successes are your own.

Re:Wake up. No participation trophies here.

[HornWumpus]

Never met one. I've met a few that thought they could. All useless egomaniacs. Leave them to their 'not sleeping', microdosing, uberman's sleep schedule etc, let them fail on their own. Look at their lives...

Stupid people working hard, just make big messes. I've never met anyone who didn't need downtime or they turn stupid.

If you have sense, you leave some in the tank for daily happiness AND the day/week/month you do need 100% sustained effort.

Also never hire anybody who uses the term '110%', unless you're looking for a bullshitter (marketer).

It depends on your dictionary

[willoughby]

Your "dogged dedication" might be "manic obsession" to me. Do you want to work to live, or live to work?

for ordinary people,

[Black Parrot]

long hours guarantee burnout but don't guarantee rising to the top.

Unless of course your management thinks of long hours a a form of sucking up; then you can "work" long hours and spend the time goofing off, guaranteeing rungs up on the company ladder without burnout.

But I question what you mean by "top of their field". Do you want to be very good at something, climb the company ladder, get rich, or be a Slashdot idol? Different personalities and strategies are needed for each.

And of course, a lucky break helps for all of those except the first.

Multiple factors

[maiden_taiwan]

Few things in life have single, simple causes, such as "working long hours." Success is generally due to multiple factors, including persistence, education, emotional intelligence, connections/politics, good health, and just plain luck. People may look back and attribute their success to one magical moment, but it ain't so.

depends on your job...

[unami]

if you are self-employed and want to be top of your field then that's the way to go - otherwise there will always be somebody equally talented, younger and without a personal life and no need for sleep, that will outrun you. there are definitely fields, where you can't compete when you have a relationship, let alone a family. (e.g. the movie industry) if you're employed, there'll always be someone else reaping the fruits of your labor, so you're just letting yourself being exploited. either way, you'll never make it to the top if you can't present and sell yourself as a hard working genius - that's even more important than actually being one.

Re:depends on your job...

[PPH]

Not really. If you are self employed, contracting for a single customer this might be true. But then you are really just an employee (that the IRS hasn't caught up with yet) and your employer just wants to squeeze as much out of you as possible. But if you actually are self employed, with multiple clients, then each one is just paying you for X hours of your time. They have no clue if you are working 80 hour weeks, burning yourself out. Or kicking back, putting in 20 hours and taking a few days off. If you really are a 'genius', people will be willing to buy a fraction of your available output. On the other hand, if you are always willing to take on more work for one client, they might wonder if anyone else is actually buying.

Depends on the type of work

[esmrg]

When the work is something like sales or marketing, long hours may be effective, since you can reach more clients or brainstorm ideas. The work isn't necessarily mentally exhausting. I can see how a VC would want long hours because getting to market first is a great way to edge out competition. But for engineering work, where correctness or deep comprehension of a problem is key, long hours will slow you down. I've seen it happen. A team will pull an all nighter, desperately rushing to solve a difficult problem or a mysterious bug only to still be stuck with it in the morning. Programming is in the realm of the mind and a good solution is rarely large quantities of code. If you need to write verbose and lengthy functions, you might be doing it wrong. Sure, you can type faster or copy and paste, but you will miss something that will take you hours to find. I find that I can solve difficult problems by relaxing and keeping the idea in my mind. Take a walk, a nap or daydream. The answer will pop into your head. It's number 37 in the 97 things. http://programmer.97things.ore...
However, the exceptions given are valid. If you fully understand the problem and know exactly what you want (and it's your personal project) stay in the groove while it lasts.

Re:Depends on the type of work

[Ambassador Kosh]

I find it hard to even do a full 35-40 hours. When working on chemical simulation code you end up having to think about the chemical reactions, the math, the numerical stability and code performance. Trying to write or debug that stuff gets so mentally exhausting that often half a day is about as much as many people really manage and they do other easy things in the rest of the day.

The worst things are when you have to debug convergence problems. The system is running and producing the correct answer but too slowly. You can plot that the order of convergence is wrong. That means someone very subtle is wrong but not wrong enough to get the answer wrong just wrong enough to slow it down. Those can take weeks of very intense digging. When you fix them a simulation can go from hours to seconds but finding them is HARD.

Getting ahead is a myth

[nehumanuscrede]

If you get your work done in half the time Bob needs to get the same work done, you'll simply be given twice as much work for your efforts because we certainly can't have you just sitting there now can we ?

Bob will then be reprimanded and ultimately fired for failing to keep up so you'll be doing his work too.

All because you thought you could " get ahead ". . . .

Itâ(TM)s a mix

[printman]

There are times when the work is constant, and you just need to keep plugging away with 6-8 hours a day of actual work to keep things moving. And there are dead times when you can work less, and crunch times when you have to pull an all-nighter.

Working long days all the time is a recipe for burnout. Most of the âoesuccessfulâ people I know work in bursts, including myself. Down time allows you body to recuperate and your mind to wander on any problems you are working on... an easy measure is this: are you excited to work a long day or dreading it?

Working Long Hours Isn't A Guarantee

[Jason Levine]

Working long hours isn't a guarantee of success. My father used to go to work at 5am every morning. He'd come home at around 5pm with a stack of work. After dinner, he'd log into his office and do more work until he went to bed. On the weekends, he brought home an even larger pile and worked on it on Saturday and Sunday.

He didn't get any extra money for all of this work. When I once asked him why he did it, he answered "My boss expects this level of work from me." (Well, of course he does. You are giving him that without insisting on overtime.)

So what did all of that work get my father? He was fired when he was in his 60s. Nobody would hire him in a managerial position because they feared he'd just retire soon. Better to hire someone younger who might be with the company longer. So he retired not because he wanted to stop working, but because he couldn't find work. He's now 70, suffering from health effects, in part, from sitting at a desk all day every day for years.

When I got my current job, I insisted that my work ends when I leave the office. If a system is down during an off-hour, I'm happy to help get it up and running again, but I'm not going to be bringing projects home to work on after hours. Could I work 10 hours a day and bust my rear to do more for the company I work for? Sure, but it wouldn't get me anything and would cost me my health and time that I could spend with my family or working on projects that I want to work on (versus my day job which pays the bills).

Re:Success? Getting Ahead? Hidden assumptions.

[Jason Levine]

Why is "success" defined as being the top in your field? Why is "reaching the top" something to be pursued?
If that's what you want, and that's what you enjoy, do it. The people I've seen get to these positions work a lot. I haven't really seen people that get to "the top" that don't. As long as you actually LIKE this, then go for it.

Some still think of success in life as climbing some ladder. If you aren't going higher, then they think you're not succeeding.

My grandmother (when she was alive) would inevitably ask me if I got a promotion at work and would express disappointment when the answer was "no." What she didn't understand, though, was that me getting promoted would mean I'd be a manager, not a web developer. This would mean having to manage people (hiring, firing, making sure people do their work when they're supposed to, dealing with company politics) instead of working with code. I love working with code, but would HATE having to do the job of a manager. Why should I "climb the corporate ladder" if it means leaving a rung that I enjoy and moving into rungs that I hate?

North West Europe vs USA?

[Anonymous Coward]

This depends on your culture.

Here in the Netherlands, many consider putting in more hours (just for more hours) as inefficient and wasteful, while my colleagues in the US consider it necessary, not just to get ahead, but even to keep their job. To many Dutch colleagues the way they work in the US is considered inefficient and 'dinosaur era' where you are appreciated for the time spent, and not for the results produced or spending your time well. We like to spent more hours only as a temporary fix to a stable planning.

During an internship at MIT for a couple of months, I noticed similar behavior which was considered by the students to be absolutely necessary for good grades: put in lots of hours, even regular all-nighters. To me they spent a lot of that time on the wrong/unrelated/side issue things, and they could have gotten the same results in about half or 2/3 the time. They would pursue every single option/angle the prof would point out, even the clearly fruitless ones. They were afraid (as in not an option at all) to tell the prof that 'yes, that was a fine idea, but perhaps not related to the core of this project and perhaps better not taken up here and now'. Actually when I told the MIT professor such in one of his talks with me about my work, he was very surprised to be told 'no', although he immediately saw the correctness of it and actually thanked me for reeling in his 'wide academic interest' that would have derailed the project.

So, when the culture requires you to spend hours, and not question the task description you might not get job-ownership, but that is not what is requested, so no problem: spend the hours.
When the culture is to value efficiency, be smarter instead of making more hours, question the task description, ask yourself with every subtask 'how does this contribute to the goal, must this work be done, must it be done by me?, etc' and created job-ownership and control in the process.

In my experience, getting overworked or burned out happens most to those that have a strong sense of responsibility and ambition that is conflicting by lack of power and possibilities they encounter.

Therefore I would argue to go for the second method as much as your local culture allows: it empowers you more to steer your own work, setting your own goals with your own rewards, while allowing you to do so in less time, leaving more time available for 'unloading'. And if you like spending much more hours, you will see that in this environment, any hours spent extra will contribute noticeably to your own end goals, and you can maintain much more easily a healthy balance between work hard-play hard with far less risk of burn out (because of the control you have over it)

Re:North West Europe vs USA?

[OrangeTide]

In the US we don't really take vacations, it's not that we work a lot of long inefficient hours, instead we avoid our families and work until we get too old and are replaced. That's efficient for business. And if you don't believe it, then perhaps you should look at the overhead that American companies have versus Netherlander companies, we save money because we treat our employees worse. It's not bragging, it's pointing out that the standard of living here in the US is so much lower.

Expect your EU jobs to be outsourced to America as the US continues our slide down. (dragging Canada with it)

Re:North West Europe vs USA?

[BarbaraHudson]

Where is your creativity? You need a family to get time off? Develop one. Photoshop or The GIMP are your friends. With so many people shacking up, HR won't be able to rat you out.

another way to look at the obvious...

[gosand]

What a flawed question.

icons like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Belichick as proof that dogged dedication (usually measured by long hours) was the only way to reach the top of your field.

Please cite how many people have worked just as hard as these guys and were NOT at the top of their field. Then we can compare.

Burning out is real, and is very hard to recover from. I have been there, and it sucked. Sometimes you don't realize how bad it sucks until you get away from it.

And is "getting to the top of your field" really your goal? I know there are people who think "wow, I wish I could be like ", but the reality is that if you were like them, then you probably wouldn't be happy. Giving everything to your job to get to the top likely leaves you with nothing left but that job. There are exceptions, but the risk is that you give it all and don't get to the top. You will always wish you either gave more, or didn't even go down that path.

I'd rather be happy, thanks.

A better question...

[MickyTheIdiot]

...is why most people are not on the 4 day work week. The numbers don't lie and the numbers say we are more productive than ever before.

What are the economic factors that are leading us to work longer rather than shorter? That's the better question. It's also the question that those that do reap the benefits of all that work do not want you to ask.

Like most things, the answer is

[mtmiller100]

it depends. and on a lot of factors. will get you ahead if: - if your company's culture rewards people who have merged their office and personal lives, where employees "hang out" at the office after hours. - your superiors know that you are a/the key member of an important, but short-staffed, project, and your extra hours contribute to its success - it is a smaller firm or department, where you aren't just another face in a large crowd... this kinda goes along with the previous 2 points. - there is actual the possibility of upward mobility where you work will just burn you out if: - your company culture is more traditional, and you are expected to go home to your family after your shift. - your superiors don't respect you, and are just taking advantage of your willingness to work long hours - you work in a large firm or department, and your immediate supervisor is not in any position to promote, or recommend anyone for promotion. The people making decisions on advancement have no idea who you are, and don't care who you are. You are just throwing precious hours down a corporate rat hole, so some trust-fund brat can make extra money doing nothing. Stop this now. Of course, these are just generalizations. Your specific situation is unique, so use your gut and you experience to determine if giving extra time to the company is worth it.

Guess what

[fred6666]

Reaching the top, becoming a billionaire, is hard. You must work a lot (and make sacrifices) and/or be extremely lucky. Most often both at the same time.

Otherwise everybody would be a billionaire like Zuckerberg and Musk.

Best way to get ahead

[OrangeTide]

Is to strike the stock option lottery. But seriously, you are not likely to be rewarded for working harder than your peers. You will be rewarded for taking on more responsibilities, but that's not the same as working harder. Your reward will be even more responsibilities and eventually a management position where the salary tends to increase at a steeper angle.

Obvious Trap Is Obvious

[IonOtter]

I do coke.
So I can work longer.
So I can make more!
So I can do more coke.

Both and neither

[lazlo]

You can observe a correlation between long hours and success, and try to achieve success via long hours, which will lead to burnout, but not necessarily to success.

Let me put it this way: There's a strong correlation between extremely financially successful companies and ownership of corporate jets. Does that mean that your struggling company should pool all its cash to buy a corporate jet, so that it'll become successful? Clearly, no.

Let me posit, that if you really love what you're doing so much that you can't stand the thought of *not* putting every hour, minute, and second that you possibly can into doing that thing you love so much, then there's a better-than-average chance that it'll be successful (and you with it).

Putting in a ton of hours will most likely lead to *either* success *or* burnout. If your goal in putting in those hours is success, the more likely outcome is burnout. If the hours are an enjoyable goal on their own, then success will be a by-product of that pursuit.

It is a lose lose proposition

[LeftCoastThinker]

Working more than 40 hours for 40 hours of pay is a suckers game. Unless you work for yourself, you are essentially taking a wad of bills and handing it over to your employer. If they can't stay profitable with you averaging 40-42 hours per week, they are incompetent and you should look elsewhere, or come back as a consultant.

The entire concept of bribing your employer with free work for an eventual raise is just disgusting. You are either good at your job and valuable and worth promoting on your merits, or you are not. The smart people make this case and get the raise, because if you do a CB analysis on working the weekends, even ignoring burnout, it looks like this:

Say you make $40/hour based on your salary and a 40h work week. Now you want to get a promotion and a raise to $50/h. So you work 70h per week for 12 months. You just donated almost $60k to your employer for a position that you may or may not get. If you don't get the position, your employer laughs all the way to the bank. If you do get the position, your simple payback on that investment is 3 years, but guess what, now your employer EXPECTS you to work 60h/week, so in reality, your pay rate is now $33/h, so not only did you give away $60k, but you are trapped working those long hours, which is, in essence, a pay cut. I have seen this time and again and I refuse to play the game. So far I have been fine. The key is to be competent and valuable and not a doormat. If you really want a meaningful raise, become indispensable and then get offers from other companies, just be prepared to switch jobs if you have to. Being your employers bitch is not a good strategy for advancement. Showing them that you are valuable and that other companies also think you are valuable is a much better strategy.

Do you work for a sane employer?

[ErichTheRed]

To answer the question in the headline, ask what kind of employer you work for. There is a _huge_ difference between working hard because you want to go a great job, and working hard because you're on your 5th death march this year.

If you work for a cutthroat employer and your co-workers are all back-stabbing and politicking their way to promotions, then of course you'll work until you're burnt out or quit out of frustration. "Tone at the top" is important when it comes to how middle managers behave and force work through too few resources. Some employers, especially in tech, just roll with it and burn through new hires because they feel there's an infinite supply of new grads who would lay down in traffic to get a job there. This was very evident in the video game industry a while back, and I'm sure it hasn't changed much. Although they're an endangered species these days, some employers at the other end of the spectrum recognize that they need to balance crazy levels of work with not burning their best performers out. Where I'm working now, we tend to do everything we can to hang on to truly useful long-service employees. If you've been working here for 20 years collecting a paycheck, this doesn't apply unless you're a major political player and "survivor." But, if you want to stick around and keep your skills fresh, you can be reasonably assured that they'll try to hang on to you even if they have to lay others off.

One of the reasons employers try to retain people is that domain knowledge is hard to impart on newbies. Back to my job, you can't just be an IT or software dev nerd; we're a services company that's actually pretty close to our customers' business. If you're working for Amazon for example, you might be one of 10,000 web developers cranking out new APIs, front end code, etc. and have difficulty differentiating yourself. Same goes for IT - if you're just a generic sysadmin with no business knowledge, the company you work for will be more willing to burn you out and take the next person in line.

Re:I burned out...

[Kohath]

Even if something happens to one person or a few people, that doesn't make it a common pattern that everyone needs to safeguard against.

Re:freaks of nature

[ErichTheRed]

"The people who work those long hours seem to be the ones who, due to a freak of nature, do not sleep as much as others."

I could see that just based on my own evidence. One of the curses of not letting yourself get pigeonholed into a tiny corner of IT is the amount of information you need to consume on a regular basis. I know it's critical for my career, so I do it, but it was a whole lot easier when I didn't have 2 kids. Unfortunately, being a non-nomad in modern IT means being able to turn on a dime, learn something incredibly fast, then pivot just as fast to the new thing. The alternative is becoming a super-specialist, devoting all your time and energy to one or two things, and having to move from job to job every couple of months because people will only hire you to clean up messes.

Lately, I'm all about finding the most efficient ways of dumping this vast firehose of information into my brain and still finding time to sleep, be a semi-normal spouse, and be a good dad. Sleep is what suffers, and I'm definitely not Edison; ask my family how I am in the morning after 3 hours' sleep.

Re:HardWork beats talent when talent doesnt work h

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I don't think that's remotely true. At the very least in programming, a truly talented person putting in average effort will be far ahead a mediocre developer working as hard as humanly possible.
The time difference for debugging a semi-hard problem in my experience is around 4 hours vs. 2 days, so for hard work to beat talent, the talent would have to be so lazy to only work 2 hours per day. That level of laziness will be very rare.

Bot

[gurps_npc]

Look, most people do jobs they are talented at. A few (less than 1%) do jobs they LOVE.

Business prefer to hire people that love their job. If you love your job, you don't get burnout no matter how hard you work. Get one person in the company that loves their job and that person sets a standard that everyone else feels they have to live up to.

In those circumstances, the only way to get ahead is to work your job as if you would rather do it then participate in a three-some with supermodels.

If you do love your job, you get ahead. If not, you get burnout.

 

Re:Bot

[HornWumpus]

Basic worker psychology:

The highest performing does not set the standard, he's 'a genius', or whatever the others have to tell themselves.

The lowest performing worker that 'gets away with it' sets the standard.

At least 70% of 'new hires' (even with best effort hiring) will operate at about this level, and they test the limit, every day. The remaining 30% are: The hard workers, who at least like their jobs, most of the time. Figuring out who those are is the key task that most middle managers fail at.

Just shuffling the 70% in and out under probation is my strategy in hiring. Leave an obvious 'coworker' that appears to do next to nothing (not a hot young woman...) and watch if they're angling to drop to that level as soon as probation period is over. They not usually as sly as they think, they're all working 'hard' during the 'honeymoon'.

Re:I burned out...

[Kohath]

No I'm not. Stop making shit up.

If there's no good reason you're doing it wrong.

[Qbertino]

It's plain and simple: If there's no good reason to log long hours, you're doing it wrong.

Good reasons:
- Pipeline isn't in place yet and needs to be built alongside the first project (Prerequisite:Boss and crew have agreed on the pipeline and everybody's working on automation with extra time payed for, Boss has understood that building the pipeline is a strategic investment.)
- Crash Project has come in and there are obscene amounts of cash involved with big bonuses involved for everybody pitching in and scooping water out of the projects hull. (Prerequisite: End of project is foreseeable because 'Deadline!' and customer is relyable/has the cash and boss knows what he's doing and so do you and you and the crew trust boss and each other)
- You've agreed to try a new technology with strategic product and pipeline shift if all works out well and are trying things out/learning things on a real world project and need to put in the extra hours up front (something like moving from LAMP to Node would be such a thing, or from on-premises monolith to cloud-microservices or such) (Prerequisite: Boss has your back and knows what's actually happening and understands the long-term implications)

Hint: All the reasons mentioned above are very rarely the case and that you ask here on slashdot tell's me and my software veteran gut feeling that there is no case of the above with you right now. If you'd trust your lead and your crew you'd be enjoy a little extra time on the job and not be doubting the jam you're in and asking questions here.

Bad reasons:
- PM/Boss is an idiot or out of his depth and couldn't definine requirements if his life depended on it and you're saving the day once again with a nightshift (this is a telltale classic and screems "Switch job!" or "Go freelance!")
- Team or mates does shit work and you're constantly cleaning up behind them
- Team has no process or pipeline and your putting in extra hours to compensate

General toughts on this:
In 90% of all cases repeated extra hours are totally unnecessary and usually a sign that someone is screwing around. The extra hours mentioned above are more of a fun/adventure thing if done right. Another thing: If *you* need to put in extra hours you're not automating enough.

Point in case: I'm doing part-time since 3 years ago (5 hours per day) and I automate my shit. To automate it, I actually do sometimes put in extra hours, but only once. If the crew can't follow along that's not my problem - or at least I see to it that it doesn't become mine. If the crew/PM/Boss is to dumb/stubborn/complacent to handle/call for/implement Planning, Agile Methods, OOAD, Analysis, Tasking, Versioning, CI, Testing and such correctly and expects me to do extra work to compensate I am polite once, get angry the second time, loud the third time and tell them to fuck themselves the fourth time and move on. This actually happend just a month ago. Very nice people, very bearable for 3 years doing part-time as mentioned but sadly too effing dumb/out of their league to see the necessity of such things as strategic pipeline building, versioning, CI, regular timeboxed meetings, Glossary/User story, proper offers/analyis, etc. I was saving the day with yet another weekend every odd month despite only doing part-time. ... Websoftware in an agency - always the same thing. Although I really like the people and we're good friends (even with the Boss I split with) there was no way this was going anywhere. Hence: Byebye.

Bottom line:
You're a software developer - automate your shit. If you regularly put in extra hours, you're doing something wrong, are in a team that can't organise (enough of those around) or are not a very good coder (yet). You're career will move on faster if you do not put in regular long hours. If you do, you're just showing everybody that you are a willing code monkey, nothing more.

My 2 eurocents.

Re:I burned out...

[Kohath]

I didn't recognize myself in any of those stories. So I guess I'm not next.

Re:What are they doing for hours?

[ErichTheRed]

"Maybe, if it's the lottery ticket that might take you to the upper ranks someday. Maybe the bonuses are worth it,"

Two examples where it might make sense include investment banking and being a corporate attorney at a prestigious law firm.
- Neither of these spots are easy to get - to get a top banking associate spot means being at the top of the best MBA programs in the country, and working for biglaw firms requires you to be at the very top of your class at one of the top 14 law schools in the country. So, you're already at the top of the elite to even think about getting in the door.
- Both of these positions are one-way tickets to Easy Street, and also pay quite well while you have them. (Starting salary is $180K at a big law firm with zero experience, and banking bonuses are measured in hundreds of thousands of dollars on top of an already high salary.)
- Both require that you put in your "time in grade" to get to the next rung, they realize this and work people to death. More than 100 hours a week is not uncommon.

So, just like the startup lottery, this is probably the only place where it makes sense to deal with the pain. Once you do, the hardest decision you'll ever have to make again is whether to buy the Rolls or the Bentley.

Re:Success? Getting Ahead? Hidden assumptions.

[Dragonslicer]

Some still think of success in life as climbing some ladder. If you aren't going higher, then they think you're not succeeding.

My grandmother (when she was alive) would inevitably ask me if I got a promotion at work and would express disappointment when the answer was "no." What she didn't understand, though, was that me getting promoted would mean I'd be a manager, not a web developer. This would mean having to manage people (hiring, firing, making sure people do their work when they're supposed to, dealing with company politics) instead of working with code. I love working with code, but would HATE having to do the job of a manager. Why should I "climb the corporate ladder" if it means leaving a rung that I enjoy and moving into rungs that I hate?

I've been asked the same thing. My response was that I still got a significant raise every year. I don't really care about my title. "Senior" or "Lead" would be nice, but I have no desire to be a personnel manager. For some people, the title is what makes you important.

long hours...

[l3v1]

My point of view regarding long hours has always been that I'm not against it, when absolutely necessary, but I think it's something that should be avoided at all costs. I've worked my share of 14-16 hour days, 6 and 7 day workweeks, but it's not something I'm proud of, or something I like to brag about. Always keep in mind, that you work to live, and not live to work - well, some people might be against me regarding that, but I don't much care about them :P

On my first US interview, of course it came up. They asked it in a way like, would I have something against the occasional longer days or something like that. When I told them that 80 hour weeks are not that unusual for me, but that I absolutely hate those, they first smiled then looked a bit confused :) Thing is, I don't like to get things unfinished, and I put in the work when it's required. But I sooo really like it when I don't have to :)

I think that when some people burn out it's not so much because of long hours, but mainly because they lose control. No work, no project, no professional commitment can be more important than one's life, family or health. Not every job is for everyone, but sometimes conditions or the economy doesn't let you move around enough, and some are not strong or brave enough to keep trying even when it'd be possible. But thing is, life is really short to be stuck in a crap job.

Re: I burned out...

[Kohath]

The safeguard is to be aware of work-life balance and evaluate your situation regularly... why would you be so adament against that regardless of how often people end careers over burning out?

Anoxexia is a real thing. Should we all worry about it all the time? Maybe eat an extra meal every week just in case?

Or can we focus on reality and not pretend we're characters in a drama -- even if the drama is based on a true story?

well..

[fluffernutter]

If you work your entire life away and pass up your chance to raise and enrich a loving family and have them enrich your life back, then you aren't really ahead.

How far from the top ?

[AncalagonTotof]

In my opinion, it depends at which level you are.

In my company, I lost the count of engineers who worked 10/12 hour a day without reward, and left in disgust, or worse, went to the burn out.
<troll>Hey, US readers, I'm French and I'm talking about a French company ! Don't believe everything they tell you ! Some French really work hard, and most French are more productive working less than their US counterparts !</troll>

But at higher levels, N+3/4/5..., it seems that the main concern is not the work done but the next seat they will take. Among those people, some are really working hard^Wa lot^W^Wlong hours. But the higher you go, the less effective work you'll notice. And the less burn out too.

To be glib...

[Torodung]

It's both.

Next question.

Re:Success? Getting Ahead? Hidden assumptions.

[rwa2]

Yeah, IT is admittedly upside down, where the front-line developers are now getting paid just as much or more than the middle management. I've been resisting getting pushed into management tracks several times for little or no additional pay, just the "privilege" of taking on additional responsibilities for motivating other people who are generally already very well-motivated and capable of being their own thought-leaders. I'm wondering when it might become a problem to want to "stay in the trenches", when I might top out my pay grade and no longer be competitive with young code monkeys. Maybe I should finally go get my PhD in something that interests me, or at least take some sort of MBA seminar (shudder).

Anyway, in my younger days I got into plenty of trouble for working too much. Fresh out of college when I could do my work-study at all hours, I would stay at the office all the time (admittedly they had much faster internet than I did at my rental condo with crappy dialup in a city 3 hours from all my hometown friends). Eventually I got into some trouble with the bored security officer for being suspicious.

Nowadays I work remotely from home and have too much of the other side of work-life balance, but I'm trying to savor it and enjoy spending time volunteering at my kids' schools before they graduate and move out. The job is a little bit too easy, all automation of existing production payment processing systems, and if we're working extra hours it's because we fucked up, and we fuck up less if we're not trying to tweak every goddamn thing all the time. So I feel like my career is at a standstill but it does pay the bills and gives me lots of flexibility for dealing with life and I'd be dumb to drop out for a more "challenging" job at this point. Typing this while working remotely (well, not really since it's 4th of July weekend) in a hostel in a foreign country with my family for the month.

When away from Home - Long hours were desired

[da_Den_man]

I used to travel and do installs/builds of solutions for clients. When away from home in this manner, I found it BETTER to work the long hours (time sensitive bonus and work) and get the work done. It kept me on track for the project, allowed me the time "alone" to get the work done without answering 20 questions, and was just a better way to do it when On-site. When I worked remote (for the same job) I found I would work 8 hours, but would break that into 2-3 hr segments so that I didn't get burnt out on the work when there was so much more to do at home/ local area. There were times when I would play 'tourist' at these locations, but that was usually on a weekend day (sunday ) and it was just so I could say I saw the area. When working as a salaried employee, I do 8 hrs...plus on-call rotation...and thats it.

It depends...but yes to burnout

[omibus]

You don't always need to work long hours to get ahead. In fact, that should be rare. The one case where I did do was in a startup where I was heavily invested. I could also be convinced if I'm payed hourly. But it will lead to burnout. Also, it will inhibit your ability to be creative. Luckily on the project I did the hours for, we did the hard part early, so in the end it was just build a bunch of web forms -- not a lot of heavy thinking there.

To get ahead, just do good work, communicate, and be dependable. Keep in mind, often you "move up" by "moving on".

Re:If there's no good reason you're doing it wrong

[goose-incarnated]

You're a software developer - automate your shit.

If I could automate the production of software I'd have the worlds first actual AI.

I'm guessing you're in a dev-ops kinda position - you can automate just about everything there. Unfortunately I'm not in that position - I write software. I change existing software to behave the way the customer wants it to. I track down bugs based on ambiguous bug reports, then I fix them.

You clearly aren't doing any of that. Your job involves repetitive stuff, hence it can be automated. Good for you. My job, since the start of my career almost, involves producing new software. Sometimes from nothing other than project charter, sometimes by modifying existing software.

If you could write a script to decipher bug reports and feature requests, and then have the script write the software to implement those requests/fix those bugs, you'd put all the developers in the world out of business and make yourself richer than anyone else on the planet.

You haven't done this yet, so I'm guessing it's not possible for you, either ;-)

Re:Let's ask creimer

[serviscope_minor]

Looks you've gained some AC stalkers. I think they should make a slashdot achievement for that.

Re:Absolutely.

[HornWumpus]

Chinese escalator. Meat grinder at the bottom...hi welcome to WalMart...have to play a conservative game, at least early, the meat grinder is always there, you can just construct your own mitigations.

Most people are too busy 'impressing each other' to notice.

Long hours necessary but not sufficient

[cowtamer]

I've seen a LOT of people put in long hours and not succeed.

However I've NEVER seen a 9-to-5'er be successful. Especially if the person is young. Especially if 9-to-5 has become a philosophy.

Certainly don't burn yourself out, in which case you'll be useless to yourself and others. But DO keep in mind that someone else who can handle the 60 hour workweek when you have to check out _will_ probably get ahead of you in that particular job.

If you're young (and I assume you are, since you're asking the question) use the time to put in hours in a job WHICH WILL EXPAND YOUR SKILLSET. If you can help it, get known as someone who's NOT afraid of the work. Even if your employer does not show you loyalty, your reputation among your co-workers may come in handy when looking for your next job -- I've helped several former co-workers find jobs because I knew they would do well.

This is an investment in yourself and in your future. You might not have the same kind of time, motivation, and energy later in life.

Re:Long hours necessary but not sufficient

[malkavian]

As I posted elsewhere, if you're employed for a 40 hour week, and still have the legs for an extra 20 hours, Spend those hours building your own company.
That way, you'll get what you're worth, build a client base, maybe employ others, and make a profit from all the work they do, plus the hours you put in. You will, in all probability, end up vastly further along the wealth curve in a decade than the person who pushes themselves to the limit working those extra 20 hours for a company that, to be honest, probably doesn't care that much.

Re:freaks of nature

[cheesybagel]

Edison was also building a device to speak with the dead when he was old. So he basically went mad.

Cause and effect

[rgmoore]

Too many hours and you don't produce quality of work. Studies have shown extra vacation and time away from the office INCREASE productivity.

That's true, but it's also true that kind of study necessarily focuses on average people. There are probably some people who can work longer house and remain productive, It's possible, maybe even likely, that part of the secret to people like Musk and Zuckerberg succeeding is that they have an exceptional ability to stay productive while working long hours. IOW, those guys may be successful in part because they put in incredibly long hours, but it doesn't mean other people will be able to get the same results by doing the same thing, even ignoring the importance of luck, being in the right place at the right time, etc.

Yes and Yes

[boley1]

Legally, that is.

Re:Let's ask creimer

[__aaclcg7560]

Looks you've gained some AC stalkers.

I got a whole circus stalking me.

I think they should make a slashdot achievement for that.

The Asshat Achievement.

Gaming the system

[senileoldfart]

I know someone who used to stay late at work playing video games on his computer, and get payed overtime. If that wasn't enough, they saw his long hours as dedication to the cause and enrolled him in their management training program. He is now driving a brand new Tesla, owns two palatial homes and a nice boat.

Nope

[Greyfox]

Work long hours only to add value to something you own. Your company. Your idea. Never work for free for anyone else. Convince other people to work for you for free. You can decide to be a wage slave, and you can also decide not to.

Knowledge & productivity are compound interest

[Wrath0fb0b]

"The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity." Richard Hamming

Hamming was right. Even at a conservative "interest rate" from this compounding knowledge, an extra hour of work a day will lead, over the course of a decade, to an enormous amount of additional productivity. Far more than you would think just by taking the extra hour as linear addition.

I saw this when I was an academic, you'd have some students stay just a bit longer in the day to get things set up to run an additional experiment or simulation overnight and then immediately have the result first thing in the morning. Meanwhile, others would get in and start the experiment and then be unproductive for a few hours while it ran. I see it in the tech industry, some folks would stay the extra hour to debug or really grok something, then later they'd be able to immediately see what's wrong or what tools could be used.

Burnout is a different thing than compounding productivity gains. I've normally seen burnout where a grad student or an employee is behind and is constantly chasing the puck but not getting more done than anyone else. Occasionally it will be due to working on a team with huge technical debt where there is never an opportunity to get into the virtuous cycle of learning more than enables you to do things more efficiently because you are putting out fires. In other cases I've seen it where people have started into a project that is Not Going To Workâ (possibly because they didn't grok the problem space to begin with) and keep banging their heads against it.

[ And, of course, this probably only applies to those in the "knowledge" business. Flipping burgers or driving a bus for an extra hour isn't going to make you any more productive in the future, sadly. I mean, I wish it were so -- we'd have a single employee making $30/hr easily doing 10x the kitchen work of a random high school student at a fast food joint. ]

Re:Let's ask creimer

[BarbaraHudson]

No need for an award. Beating them up is its own reward.

Lets you get rid of any antisocial vibes (without guilt because they asked for it) so you can be nice to the people who deserve it.

What have you done lately?

[dbIII]

If used to get ahead you are stuck with doing it, because what you've done recently is normally the only thing considered for promotion.

Re: I burned out...

[Kohath]

Yeah, I tend to believe what I see and doubt anonymously sourced dramatic stories.

You'll stay exactly where you are if you work ...

[Ihlosi]

You'll stay exactly where you are if you work long hours, because management will realize that if you are promoted, your successor will be less effective at your former job. They'll consider you "well placed" at your current position and leave it at that.

Oh, that is unless ...

[Ihlosi]

... you're self-employed or the owner of the business. Then go ahead and work yourself to exhaustion.

Depends on what you mean

[jandersen]

There is a lot of woolly thinking around what it takes to succeed. The ones that have achieved spectacular success will, not surprisingly, point to things like their amazing talent, high intelligence, incredible determination, ability to focus 100% 24/7 and so on; it is, however, mostly unfounded. There have been studies (this year, but I don't have a link) showing that what actually makes the difference, is mostly luck: you can have all the qualities and talent, but you have to be in the right place at the right time, and that is mostly down to lucky circumstances outside your own control. You may have been born with very high intelligence, but unless you go to a good school, it won't be developed in the best way - you find school far too easy, and become lazy, you find your school mates uninteresting, and become a loner without social skills. Or you may go to university, get top grades, but because you come from a poor background, you don't fit into the social network of those from a richer background, and therefore don't go directly into a top-level job. To succeed in business, you have to not just be talented and intelligent, you also need to have this fundamental feeling of entitlement, that you only get if you grew up as part of the ruling elite.

So, perhaps if you were lucky enough in your life, you find it rewarding to work hard, and therefore always want to work. You probably had the privilege to choose your favourite line of work, you had a safety net in your family, so you could be bold in your ventures, and you could make several attempts, if you failed. And of course, today, with an always-on environment, you can be at work on the beach or anywhere you like, so you can claim to work 20 hours a day, really. Compare this to the more normal situation, where you work because you have to, in any job that might be within your reach, and you get at most one chance to set up a successful business, because if you fail, you will be so broke that you have no second chance. In that situation, why would you work harder than you must? For most of us, if you dig a hole in record time, all you get is a bigger shovel, so you can work harder.

Cause and Effect

[zymurgeek]

I feel long hours are more of a side effect of success than a cause of it. If you love what you do, you tend to do more of it, and people see that. But doing more of a job you don't love won't necessarily make you more successful. Haven't we all known a coworker who put in long hours but wasn't producing value?

Seriously?

[Timothy2.0]

"Rabois cited icons like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Belichick as proof that dogged dedication (usually measured by long hours) was the only way to reach the top of your field." Handful of cherry-picked examples proves gross over-generalization... Interesting premise...

Re:Difference between a job and a career

[AutodidactLabrat]

It's always Crunch time, according to the 1% who profit off your work.

Re:freaks of nature

[cheesybagel]

You want to know of a non-sequitur? The whole premise of this article where they claim that you need to work long hours to be successful.

Apples and Oranges.

[malkavian]

All the people he's mentioned have followed their interests and been pretty damn bright. If you're playing with something that interests you, and can (for many meanings of the word) be considered "playing", then spending all the hours under the sun, and many that aren't, is a great way to enjoy yourself. One in a few hundred million just happens to have something for which "play" is also worth a lot of money, and they find themselves on a rocket ride to riches.
Most, however, don't have that luxury.
If you're being _employed_ by someone to do some work, there's an incredibly large chance that it's not "play". It's a job. Doing that "eternal grind" that needs doing, irrespective of whether you like it or not, is not a recipe for fulfilment. It's a fast way to burnout, as the anxieties of being forced to do something without remit takes its toll.
So, what it could more reasonably be phrased as is: "If you're working for yourself, and love what you do, and consider it almost play, then keeping the nose to the grindstone and putting in endless hours may, if you're lucky, be a good way to get ahead, though you could lose everything if you get it wrong".
I did my time working for myself (quite lucratively, before I moved on for ethical reasons to a job in the health sector; I still get people coming to me to this day to see if I'll do extremely well paid work for them, which I occasionally do), and I always hark back to what my father told me many a year ago (he ran a very successful company and is comfortably retired, though he still works at a light pace, simply because he'd get bored if he didn't 'play'): "You'll never get rich working for someone else". And that's pretty much the crux. If you're working for someone else, they have to consider that what you're providing for them is worth MORE than what you're selling it to them for. Otherwise, how could they make a profit from it?

Having a salary coming in is a 'safer' option. Nothing wrong with that (I quite like it; far less frenetic than working for myself or running a small company with all the responsibilities that carries, and I'm no spring chicken anymore). However, all the EXTRA time you put in is effectively lining someone else's pocket. If you REALLY want to get ahead, what you should do is spend that extra time _working for yourself on your own small business_ until it gets running, and you have your own clients that pay you what you're worth. And when you scale up, and hire more people, you pay them a fair rate, but one from which you most certainly will be making a profit on.
Burning yourself out for an employer is NOT the way to get ahead. I'm afraid the chap has introduced a false dichotomy (you can work hard for your employer to get ahead, or you can get left behind). Choose option 3 if you want advancement, or else choose life and work a fair shift for fair recompense for an employer.

Re:Knowledge & productivity are compound inter

[malkavian]

Yes, but in the usual environment, you're working for someone else. So that extra productivity.. It makes a lot more money for your employer(s), but not necessarily more for you.

Working 18 hours a day

[strikethree]

Of course, if you can find something that you like doing and people will pay you money for it AND putting in more work will have a logarithmic effect on the money you get, then spending 18 hour days Monday thru Monday can be a very empowering thing for many many years.

The issue is this: Is working 18 hours a day where someone else gets the lions share of the remuneration for the productivity a sustainable concept?

The stunningly obvious answer is: No.

Well then everyone who is working for someone else's (how do you say else in a possessive manner? Everything I type there, my browser yells about. WTF?) benefit is a total moron. If you have employees, by definition, they are utter losers who should be FORCED to work 18 hours a day since they obviously do not have the wherewithal to create their own niche within modern society.

Man, this society is so fucked. I can't wait for the terrorists to kill us all and implement a dictatorship. At least then, any survivors will be well and truly fucked instead of hoping for Freedom, Liberty, Self Determination, etc.

Productivity is irrelevant to your benefit

[SuperKendall]

I know I'm late to this party, but I had to point out something everyone seems to be overlooking here - productivity is only one measure of gain from long hours, and in the long run it's the one that matters least to you - it matters more to the company you work for.

What is being discounted here is the EDUCATIONAL value of long hours. I sometimes worked insane hours when I was out of school (90-100 hour weeks at times). But I didn't regret it at all because in just a few years I had built up a huge base of experience from that.

I'm sure after the first 40 hours I was not as productive as I would have been with some sleep. But most of the educational value as I was exploring solutions seems to have stuck with me rather well.

There is huge benefit to becoming an expert with a deep knowledge base as early in your career if possible. It makes the rest of your time working so much easier, and frankly less scary because you have seen so much you have a lot more confidence you can solve the problem at hand. It leads you to being calmer and making better choices in a crisis...