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

[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]

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

[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

[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.

False dichotomy

[Anonymous Coward]

Why can't it be both?

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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: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.)

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.