Yes, if you're starting your own business then it could help you to work as much as you can.

However, most people do not run their own business. Most people are low-level code monkeys in large firms where individual efforts aren't business critical. When your project gets cancelled for the 3rd time and you still get a raise, it finally clicks that your work doesn't really matter. This takes a psychological toll. As a result, most people I know in FAANG who are 28+ years old will sheepishly admit that they do very little actual work (30 hours max per week). That's the whole point of hiring people straight out of college: you get ~5 years out of them before they realize what the game is. The ones who are happy with the "truth" become managers, and the ones who aren't opt to keep their head down and coast, or just quit from "burnout".

Yeah, or you can avoid all that by going to startups.

Working 60hr/week for a startup is completely illogical. It's the sort of thing you only do drunk on kool-aid.

> It's the sort of thing you only do drunk on kool-aid

Did not realise believing in a mission is akin to joining a suicide cult.

Work doesn’t have to suck. It doesn’t have to be everyone’s calling. But it is for some of us, and sixty+ hours a week can be time well spent. My time at start-ups has been time around colleagues I love, work I enjoy and a mission I believe in. (I was also decently compensated while there and exorbitantly so on the upside.)

There are countless public servants, non-profit employees, artists and public-company workers putting in those hours and more finding reward in their work. No need to deem everyone who doesn’t fit your lifestyle an idiot.

I mean - feel free if you actually think your job is aligned with your life's goal.

Me? I'd rather do what I can to make Art. So it's nice that I can get a software company to subsidize it thoroughly.

I'm just glad I can get paid effectively for being Skilled instead of laboring with my Skill. Availability is the best ability after all.

There's a balance between passionate hustle and diving into burnout. Some people can do more than others. etc etc. It's more sustainable for mental health to not make every waking minute about work, and take breaks and vacations. If you don't have a life, there's no point to working.

It doesn't have to, but the most likely outcome in a startup is it goes bankrupt, what you did disappears into the dark hole of failed ideas, and no one sees it.

It's a suckers game: the default behavior needs to be "when the founders get greedy and kick me out...what will I do then? How will I feel about that time?"

> what you did disappears into the dark hole of failed ideas

If the work is for financing a life outside it, yes. But if the work is rewarding in itself, then said failure is—while highly disappointing—balanced by the relationships, stories and skills gained therefrom.

This is absolutely a risk tolerance and personality matrix thing. I just want to push back against this recently-popular philosophy which idealises the Western European work ethic and lifestyle. It is one among many local optima.

Working 60 hours a week probably leaves you with less relationships+stories+skills than working 40 hours a week.

I would say the opposite - the only job I can imagine (outside of the first two years of investment banking) working 60+ hours/week would be a startup - where each and every hour in those first 2-3 years can make the difference between building a Billion dollar company or just getting left behind.

The only time id do that is if I was the founder.

Employees are too likely to be screwed over, even if the company is successful

I mean, a lot depends on your level of seniority, what type of equity you negotiate, how likely it will be diluted, whether you are likely to have a $100mm/$500mm/$1B exit. A lot depends on the integrity of the CEO in the event of an acquhire (probably the most common exit) and how well the Principle engineers will be compensated (Retention Bonuses usually).

I will agree with you - it's probably batshit insane for a working stiff without a good chance of a $2mm+ payout to be working 60+ hours/week for years on end.

Define screwed over? Because in my view getting screwed over is joining the industry on promise of working on deep tech and ending up a tiny cog in a machine.

Most startups aren't engineering-bound though

Amdahl's Law

And do a lot more work for way less money? Your work will have more impact, that's for sure. But at some point you'll have a higher-level realization that you're still working in a capitalist hellhole and you're not being fairly compensated for the risk compared to the VCs or the founders. If I was going to work in a startup or FAANG from 22-30, I'd pick FAANG for the guaranteed million dollars in the bank.

The only exception I'd personally make is to found a startup with people I enjoy on a problem that I'm personally motivated by. This is basically a band for capitalistic nerds. Even then, you still have to allow VCs to suck out your soul.

And given what kinds of products and services the vast majority of startups out there provide, even "impact" is questionable.

very little work - 30 hours a week? I think "older" people at FAANGlikes put max 15 hours a week.

I read it more as "no one is having 40 hours per week of productive work continuously".

Even in your example, being productive for 60+ hours is possible, but for how long? There might be extreme (extreme!) outliers, but I think it's fair to say that at some point you will increase your productivity by putting in less hours.

In the marketing agency world 50-60 hour weeks are the norm and 70 hour weeks occur once a month or so. It isn’t really sustainable. Most people burn out and leave the agency world within three years. Those that stay often make work their life or have a way where they can set their own schedules, which is usually because they have reached marketing executive level and the work becomes different.

It is a very unhealthy industry. I am not sure if it can be sustained in it’s current form, but I don’t ever see the hours being reduced either. 4 day work weeks would just mean 12+ hour days and you would have to hope your clients aren’t open on Fridays or whatever day you decided to make your company day off. Staggering days wouldn’t work that well as most agencies have little to no redundancy by design.

How much of that is working time, and how much of it is sitting in a room not being productive? Every productivity study I've read finds that per-week productivity drops off tremendously with that level of overwork.

Productivity per hour drops, but it doesn't matter to the agency because all of their employees are salaried. It is not people sitting in a room not being productive per se, but it is a bunch of burned out employees not being as efficient as they could be.

Again, this leads to burnout and employees that are sufficiently burned out either quit or are fired for no longer being able to meet the productivity requirement and/or making mistakes. The agency does not care because the supply of recent college graduates in marketing and communications is never ending (it is one of the most popular majors at almost any college/university).

Interestingly, slower work to a point is better for the agency since they bill the client per hour. That reverses when the quality of work suffers or the employee is no longer able to get everything done that was promised to the client. The agency gets more value out of a single employee when they work longer hours. Bonuses are common in the agency world, but they are typically meager compared to the extra hours worked. Burning out their junior employees is then to the advantage of an agency that bills by the hour.

I can work 55 hours a week in perpetuity as a founder, with the exception of four off grid, week long vacations a year. Even two weeks over 60 hours (e.g. fundraising across timezones) and I rapidly lose it.

But is your overall productivity higher with 55 hours than it would be with less hours?

It's the kind of question where I wouldn't really believe your answer, unless you've actually tried to experiment yourself where is the cutoff (for your specific situation) between hours / productivity.

Not because I think you would answer in bad faith, but because it's a really complex question. What if working less hours over multiple years would let you pursue some hobby, turn you more sociable and thus a better leader/CEO?

Or maybe it would make you just very slightly better at decision making. You would have less time to manage your company, maybe relying more on others, but in exchange you would have more energy for the really crucial decisions. Or enough energy for extending that 2-weeks international crowdfunding effort into a 3-weeks.

Yes, over the course of a 12 year full time career, if I go above 55 it gets worse, but I can sustain 55. In terms of trade offs, there's something to be said for parkinson's law. If I have way more than 55 hours a week of stuff, I know I have to fit it into 55 or I'll burn out. If I aim for less, I find I never end up working less than 40, even if the absolute amount is much lower.

I would just say that choosing to work more than 40 hrs per week is very different to being forced to work 40 hrs per week. Simply because someone can happily choose more work hours does not mean that the de facto standard should be that high or even at 40 hrs.

> are the sole founder in the company

yeah in this case, if its really your dream, go right ahead.

most workers aren't the founders of the company.

> One can easily put in 60+ hours for weeks on end and be incredibly productive while doing it.

Do you have an objective measure of that? I've worked with plenty of people who thought they were being productive for 60+ hours/week, but none of their productivity actually stacked up. Founder/CTO types were the worst, they'd bypass process and cause outages but because of their position everyone had to coddle their ego and pretend that they were doing good work and the trouble wasn't their fault.

I can do 60s in bursts, and the bursts have lasted as long as 2 months before. I usually burn out as soon as we hit the finish line, and work 10-20 hour weeks for a while until all the comp-time is used up. But I can really do a fantastic amount of programming when I dedicate my entire brain to the project and completely exclude all other thoughts. OTOH I have to admit that both of the biggest production screwups I ever made happened in those crunch times. But seeing myself hit those levels of productivity actually gives me a ton of satisfaction. Some of my normal 40 hour weeks when my head isn’t in the game are so un-productive that it depresses me.

You asked about objective measures, but I’m not sure how programming can really be quantified. All I can say is my “hyper-mode” has caused projects to reach deadlines that others on the team thought were unlikely.

Can you give us some advice on how you recharge effectively between such bursts? Since starting receiving salaries I am staying within 40+ hours work weeks but it does depress me because indeed my head is not always in the game. I thought about only doing the necessary busywork for some weeks because I want to get difficult projects done that just won’t work out if I’m not full-in. But I get feelings of guilt whenever I do that, and that prohibits recharging.

> If you have no family

So that's... maybe 20% of the workforce?

> are the sole founder in the company

And with this we narrow it down to maybe 1% or less of the workforce.

He can be broad because your conditions don't apply to the overwhelming majority of workers. Statistically, your conditions cover an insignificant group.

"Absolutely no one" and "1%" have entirely different meanings to me. I thought it important to highlight the "insignificant" case (of which I am a member) to avoid some notion that this applies to 100% of people in reality. The way we usually go on about work around here concerns me, and I fear we risk alienating a very energetic and well-meaning segment of the community.

HN comments (and in general, forum comments) are not PhD theses, they're generic, casual comments that in many cases try to tell a story.

Hyperbole is to be expected.

Hyperbole or not it has an impact when repeated like some religion. This comment thread is making me not want to participate on hackernews.

I think (I don't know you) that I wouldn't want you to do that, but to each their own.

You sound like you're having a bad day outside of HN, as this has been just a regular and might I say, civil, chat, otherwise.

A temporary break from HN (or social media in general), might not be a bad idea :-)