Interviews are high stress, emotionally draining, and, honestly, frequently rather degrading due to being talked down to. It's like having the fight or flight part of your brain firing on max for 5 hours. I agree that the only thing I really want to do at the end of such days is turn off.
That is wildly different from my day to day. After work, I'm still hyped to go to the gym, do some woodworking, program more, study. The world is an exciting place.
I've also found that if I succumb to the reddit infinite-scroll, a sense of numbness washes over me that takes awhile to shake free. I scroll like I'm seeking a high and nothing is doing it. Contrast that with, say, reading a book after work. Such a thing has never left me feeling the same empty feeling.
That said, even today I can definitely work myself into a state where my brain just collapses if it attempts to do anything complex, and doing even the simplest chores seems like climbing Mt. Everest.
However I have some morbidly obese co-workers who still manage to keep up with me and stay sharp for longer in some cases. Likewise I've read some blogs about some people who genetically can be at full capacity, or near to it, off of 5 hours of sleep consistently. I'm honestly jealous
I'm sure he has a strong will but I think Carmack is some variety of biologically gifted for sure, lucky bastard.
It's certainly given him an advantage, though he "jokes" that he'll probably die early.
>Robert Sapolsky, who studies stress in primates at Stanford University, says a chess player can burn up to 6,000 calories a day while playing in a tournament, three times what an average person consumes in a day.[1]
[1] https://www.espn.com/espn/story/_/id/27593253/why-grandmaste...
Out: CO2
That extra C atom comes from your metabolism. If you're in a calorie deficit, it has to come from your C atom reserve storage.
That's a way of saying that breathing faster won't burn more fat just because of the breathing: burning fat is a bit more elaborate than that.
Which is wrong, since breathing involves pumping air with your muscles.
Yes, and that will be your muscle mass as well as body fat if you're not exercising and maintaining a decent protein intake.
It is true that chess at the competitive level burns calories. (More like an extra 1000 a day during a tournament.) Coupled with tournaments not allowing food, players do lose weight over a few days! But like you said, the 6000 number is an exaggeration.
We're all different. I certainly know people who can be focused for more than seven hours a day (some colleagues, me when I was younger, my family doctor, my dentist). Personally, as an introvert, what drains me most is interacting with people. I think I could be coding 7 hours on my personal project and still be rather fresh. But this isn't what my job looks like, unfortunately.
On the flip side, even for coding I don't love, I can usually grind out 9-10 hours at fairly high productivity; I usually won't because I have other priorities to balance but I can. If I find what I'm working on really interesting, I can do 12 hours at high productivity.
For work, I try to have 2 days a week where I put most of my meetings so that hopefully at least 1 or 2 days of the rest are high productivity.
Being able to solve interesting problems all day and directly reap the rewards is positively alien to the avg SWE enduring their 9-5 grind on 'business problems' in a CRUD gulag to pay off their boss' new yacht.
Personally, I am drained by meetings and am in my happy place in front of an editor working on a grand project, one that I find interesting.
The moment work stops being interesting, eg due to lack of complexity, I leave.
Chaos and complexity energise me.
Smart Guy Productivity Pitfalls https://waivek.github.io/website/tooltip.html
I then came to tech and started coding. It was a breath of relief. I didn’t know what you’re supposed to do on saturdays!
But when you get in the zone and start writing a large amount of non-crud code, seven hours is kinda the max. You’re totally wiped out. Coding a complex application is quite unlike anything except writing a complex novel or technical document. No one, I mean NO ONE who writes well writes for 11 hours a day lol. The most prolific writers average an hour.
There are SO MANY environmental and physiological factors which go into your state of mind. Some variables that I try to control for:
1. What (if anything) did you eat today
2. How much water did you drink
3. Did you shower today
4. How much sleep did you get, or how long have you been awake (probably the most important one right here)
5. What is the warmth of the light where you are working (is it cloudy and rainy outside?)
6. What is the temperature of the room
7. Is anything else going on in your life occupying your mind right now? If you take medication: did you take your medications?
8. Did you exercise today? Do you exercise at all? Are you healthy?
9. How is your posture?
10. Is your work environment clean? Is it noisy?
11. Do you work better with music on, or in silence?
12. Did you drink so much caffeine that you are now manic and can't focus?
13. Are you happy?
The brain is a part of the body
I think it depends precisely what you are doing. There is a difference between low cognitive effort (e.g. reading) and high effort (e.g. creating an algorithm or playing chess). Low effort uses glucose, whereas high-effort requires the microglia (the brain's immune cells) to create lactate and transport it to the neurons. Excess microglia activation has been linked to anxiety, depression and neuroinflammation.
I suspect it's not physically possible for a chess grandmaster to play for 90 hours a week, but probably quite easy for the average person to read or write for 90 hours a week (with some breaks).
>start writing a large amount of non-crud code, seven hours is kinda the max.
Most programming jobs are just writing "crud code" if you want to call it that...basically mostly meetings, and cranking out banal code. You can certainly do this for 90 hours a week without fatigue, although it will likely lead to burnout in the long-term, so it's probably better to find a job that does require significant mental effort, but without requiring 90 hour weeks.
The only time I've found it has come close is when actually writing a hypothesis or review paper: having to read through the literature in order to come up with a coherent theory while juggling the concepts in my head. It's very similar to solving a programming problem, and does involve significant mental effort.
But it probably also depends on the speed that it's done at. For complex algorithms or prototypes I prefer to just power through and get the whole thing done to the prototype stage in half a day (or whatever it takes, depending on the complexity), then spend the next month (or whatever) fleshing it out. There are probably other ways of doing it that don't require such cognitive effort at the beginning, but I find that for complex problems that's sometimes the best way of solving them, at least in my experience, and it only involves significant mental effort for a very short period of time.
I would say that in such instances, often times the code is banal, but proper modeling of the reality, even in cases where final result looks like a classical crud, is where complexity hides.
I say "hides", because, from my experience, only those directly involved in the implementation are actually mentally exposed to it. If they care about the quality of the output, that is.
I on the other hand can go 12 hours getting up once or twice to go to WC and will skip lunch. Taking a break most of the time sounds like a punishment. When I’m working on a problem and hold a lot of information in my working memory taking a break would only set me way back. Meetings are avoided unless absolutely necessary. Emails and messages are answered before I shut down as they don’t require much focus. That’s how I love working. But I’m also very introverted and robotic. I need to find a more balanced approach and appreciate my gf’s influence on me but it doesn’t come naturally to me.
I can totally imagine that someone who's sufficiently intrinsically motivated, and has enough mental capacity, willpower or whatever to put in long hours, longer hours might very well produce a linear increase in productivity. But most people are going to be exhausted at some point. Or demotivated. And enough of that is going to bring productivity down.
So it's the kind of thing that might very well work for you, but you can't demand the same thing from others.
People mention REM and I don’t know how to be certain but I think I do hit REM, the fitbit refused to analyze sleep less than 4 hours for me, but when I’m just slightly over it, it reports good percentages of both REM and Deep, 23% REM and 21% Deep, according to them above average. It never likes my durations though, always too short. I only sleep 6 hours on average according to it.
First two hours awake in the morning is devoted to toddler, which includes feeding him, dressing him, then waiting for 0730 so I can take him to school.
Similar schedule when he returns.
Hopefully when he's older things will be easier in the morning.
Actually I'll go further and say most of our work is a net negative for society. Ads are just psychological manipulation to trigger feelings of jealously and greed. Or producing new mixed plastic silicon junk with a 3-year supported software stack but could run for a decade but then millennia in the trash dump. PFAs in all our water supplies.
Okay even more demotivated now.
His time outside of work is undoubtedly much more free and dedicated to recharging than the one of the guy that has to do chores on the weekend and has effectively barely any rest.
Another huge factor is being able to avoid external stressors which are what really drain people and cause burnout I think, having bad co-workers or manager, health issues, family issues, etc. is a killer and will impact your focus drastically. Big difference between working long hours because you are having fun versus working long hours because a boss is breathing down your neck and you'll be fired if you don't finish something in a few weeks
Carmack is also in a favorable position where he's basically always been able to choose only projects he's passionate about for work, so he can't really see the perspective of somebody being forced to work on something pointless by their boss
my take from his comment was that even when you are too mentally drained to write code or something similarly demanding, you could still do stuff like meetings, responding to emails, getting feedback from customers, planning stuff you will code when mentally fresh, etc. So the critical thing is to make sure you can focus on valuable stuff when you are at your best and try to save the other stuff for later
Doesn't matter how much I love an activity I can hardly do it all time for more than few days.
This is stuff most people would call "work" because it does take effort, it makes me a better developer and much of it ties somewhat directly into problems I'm facing at work. But for me it's winding down after work, and recharging for the next day.
Sometimes I have so much to do at work that I need to just read fiction or play around in the darkroom to relax. But this is not the norm -- it's happened twice in the last decade, and lasted for about a month.
So for the question of how many days I can do it? On average 1795.
Considering just the general area of IT, maybe 80 %? I get to do product development which is my interest, but there are also many things which I would like to be different, like purpose of product, organisational size, leadership philosophies, etc.
Now -- why do you ask?
I can work all waking hours on passion projects (including the boring grind - not just the infatuation and ideation phase) as long as it's self directed. Finding work opportunities that aren't orthogonal to long term areas of interest and don't feel like accumulating useless experience and constructing a parallel career is hard.
Ok but you're literally describing a burnout cycle. Some people would prefer to just skip that part and have a completely sustainable working pace.
I can work 16 hour days also, but I'm still dealing with a good portion of that at a seriously degraded mental state. At the end, I'll be making the dumbest mistakes, and it's questionable if that time is even useful.
Athletes do it best I think. They have their cycles of sport, training and recovery. They know their limits. They know their optimum.
I mean getting exercise is definitely good for you and in a choice between too much and too little I think you're better off overdoing it, but just constantly burning your metabolism at full steam seems to age you faster, couple that with the impact caloric deficit is supposed to have on aging and at least in my mind there's a pretty clear connection between the two.
First of all, a healthy body is very good at adaptation, i.e. if properly trained, your bones, muscles and other tissues get thicker and less prone to tearing, breakage etc.
Second, you will be surprised at how much pressure could daily activities put on your tissues, e.g. your vertabrae disks get higher pressure when you are wobbly sitting than standing even with some additional load. And in my experience people who train their body for extreme conditions have less problems in their elderly than people who never trained much at all.
And as you've noticed, most sportspeople have troubles with their serious traumas, not due to routine trainings. Plus of course this traumatization level varies from sport to sport.
In this friends case it was the NFL part that caused the damage. Not the fitness part.
I once did a boxing class. The day we did drills with with those boxing pads that require 2 hands to hold up, my head was throbbing for the rest of the day. Tried it again and same thing. Then I quit. Clearly I cannot take a serious punch.
I know several pro swimmers though and haven't heard of any serious issues there, so i guess it's from the impacts and constant running.
Me, like the good nerd, I am developed back problems instead
Please stop projecting your ideal work life onto other people.
Mental preferences are endlessly complex. It’s not ok to assume everyone has your preference and can work the same hours and way you do. It’s also not ok to project that towards some work / life balance that assumes things outside work are primary drivers in everyone’s lives.
Some people derive their main satisfaction in life from the fruit of their work. That’s ok too.
I'm a coder by trade, but I've never really spent lots of personal time coding, like most of the really good coders I know. That's just not fun for me.
On the other hand, I do sometimes spend many personal hours making spreadsheets for fun. I need to figure out how to get paid for that.
Or don't. Monetizing your leisure activity might well turn it into Just More Work that drains and stresses. Speaking for myself, I needed zero-stakes activities as a pressure relief valve when I was doing the corporate job, or I'd end up relying to chemicals to simulate that relaxation and get back to baseline. Benzos rot your brain, booze makes you fat; pottering in the ham shack does neither.
BUT HE SHOULD!
One of his first jobs was a soul crushing dev work when they had to write X random PC utilities every Y week for some monthly subscription thingy. You know what he did? He started slacking like crazy at work so he could work on game development with his bodies at home. Using company equipment he more or less stole from work.
(I think he was sued for this, and then repeated it many years later and was sued by Facebook)
So technically, he worked shorter hours. He just didn't tell his boss.
Source: https://www.amazon.com/Masters-Doom-Created-Transformed-Cult...
Most people doing what he did would get so fired so quickly... yet when everbody's favorie guy does it...
I can easily work my day job, go to the gym and give it my best, and then come back home and fire up my own project if I’m generally feeling happy.
If I’m stressed it can lead to some other mental health issues and then even my day job is effected.
I think anyone can do this if they were allowed to structure their work the way they want and work on the things they want to. Then we’d all be Carmacks in our chosen field. But we aren’t all so lucky.
But is there context switching? I can probably do 12hrs of X, but if it's 8hrs of X + 4hrs of Y, X and Y being things I enjoy and want to do very much, I don't think I'd have the wherewithal to switch to Y after 8hrs of X. 12 hrs of X: you're already in the groove, you have the context, you're working toward a goal in a continuum. 4hrs of Y, you have to spend activation energy, fiddle a bit with finding where you left off, what the problem space was, before you get in the groove. That take-off alone will sap probably an hour. You can do it, but attended with all our human foibles, are you going to mentally decide you're going to start Y, after 8hrs of X?
There’s also a lot of other commentary on his capabilities outside of that one account, so it seems likely to be true imo.
It's John Carmack. There's nothing typical about him, he's Kristy Hawkins tier atypical.
It's like asking superman how much weight we should be able to lift. Doesn't apply to most average folks.
Honestly he sounds a bit narcissistic though. Especially in context. It's hilarious that I say that because I have a LOT of respect for him and iD software producing OpenGL games when everyone else was busy licking Microsoft's DirectX boots for that sweet sweet 24/7 dedicated Microsoft support and accomodation that Apple and the Linux community were never known for lol.
At the end of the day, you can be an astronaut or a surgeon or whatever and sure, you'll have your crazy weeks, but you'll also have a life outside of work. If they can live a normal life, IDK why I'd want to go working "passionate" long hours for a company that makes video games.
Meanwhile someone who is a salaried worker is often not rewarded at all for doing any additional work. Often not even with paid overtime. If you finish a task fast you will get another task, not a promotion. The cynical take is that the managers (or business owners) cannot promote their key employees, because who will then do all the work on time?
In fact if the managers have a "star" and two "potatoes" they will usually reward the star with more work. Often without any noticable change in pay. Maybe some small bonus. But that bonus is often nothing when compared to real contribution. If you did 200% more work than the 2 potatoes you will oftenbget a 15% higher bonus. What is simply not worth it.
Even if you are a builder who likes to build - you are screwed. Most orgs dont even try to recognize their key talent. They dont know who pushes the company forward (apart from sales teams where it is relatively easy to indentify who sells more, but it doesnt often work that way - best sales people are those who open blue oceans - and I only saw that working once).
I actually agree with him that people who spend less hours will probably be less productive.
But as someone who switched jobs and had so far 40 half-hour meet and greet calls and who now sits for 6 hours per day in "alignment calls" I wonder when I am supposed yo do any actual work. Im a "builder" but the organization does not give me time to build - constant distractions, constant "update calls" - and when I finally have 2 free hours my energy levels are drained by the useless stuff.
So those books that say that those big managers, leaders, builders wake up at 4am to do undistracted work - I understand. Or that they sit until late hours to actually do something, or even write emails in the evenings. In the (very good) book "Master's of doom" we could read that Carmac slept at the office. But at the end of the day he got millions from that. A typical salaried person might get maybe 50% better bonus for spending your life in the office. So why do that? You waste a lot of hours for your life (say 2 hours per day) to get a bonus worth 0,5 of your monhly salary? One could calculate earnings per hour and come to a conclusion it is not worth it. You are already paid what you are paid, the cynical view is do just enough to keep your spot and then optimize for leaving work after 8 hours and doing home stuff at work (buying stuff, reading news..).
The whole corporate reaward structure does not reward you for work. It rewards you gor visibility.
On a side note: the japanese who stay at work for 12 hours per day seem to mostly sit there, do chores, online shopping, sleep. I actually believe that they make maybe 5 hours if work, but are available (what of course is useful) for 12. If they sat at work for 8 hours, would they have a productive 4 or 6 hours?
Most people arent savants like Carmac who are productive for 8 hours in an 8 hour job. Carmac was in an undistracted "builder mode / rhytm" for months. In my corporate envitonments it is a good thing if I can get undistracted 2 hours.
Also most people arent rewarded adequatly for contributing more. If the company isnt yours or if you arent getting a % bonus, if you work long hours you will just have a shitty life. (Many poor people have a shitty life too obviously but with even less money)
Fuck at my new org I'm even double booked on 2 calls at the same time. Do you think I contributing much to any?
Why the whole org cant setup 2 hours with no distraction? Would everyone ignore it? Would many "people managers" who do nothing but distract have nothing to do? In addition reality is that lots of workers need someone standing behind them with a deadline / stick to do make them do work.
I maybe should start a blog, or read a book. But would everyone even want to read those thoughts and rants
Most of us don’t compare to him lol.
I disagree with Carmack that most jobs have enough different types of work that you can always find something you're not already burnt out on. That's one thing I think he's missing.
But if you figure out what things actually nourish or recharge you and which drain you (which may not be what you think at all and can take some effort and time to figure out), I'd hope you aren't left in the Reddit-swiping vegetative state quite so much! That's another thing I think he's missing: his work was actually nourishing for him, which isn't true for everyone. That's why in some ways being obsessive is "easier", you have a self-recharging activity and don't have to figure that out like everyone else!
I’m exactly like this too. I enjoy my work way more than average, but depending on the day I have between 6 and 12 (median 7) focused hours to do work before my brain sort of grinds to a halt. But when I get home, if I unwind mindfully and don’t get trapped on HN or YouTube, I can go meet some friends for dinner or go to the climbing gym, and that feels energizing instead of draining.
Who is even in the Carmack tier of programmers? Like maybe 3-4 other people ever?
Yes.
What he is saying, is that success has a price. If you want to achieve something great, you need to work your ass off (well, unless you're inheriting a fortune or some other unusual situations). When you work in a job where giving your best doesn't make much difference - that may be not obvious. But if you are working towards meaningful, it does - a huge one.
There's an obvious answer here being that he's the John Carmack.
I do agree with the "go to the gym" part of his spiel.
I need some time to recover to get my brain functioning again. When I finish my 8 to 4 work day of average intensity (as in not exceptionally stressful or busy), WFH I'm with my kids, there are a lot of things I can't do until I have some rest. You mention hangover, perhaps. Is more like waking up after only sleeping 4 hours.
When the kids are on bed and the house jobs are done, say 9pm I can have a shower and I may be 80% to do any intellectual activity. Sometimes, as you say, may be watching a series or something like that; definitely not rockets.
It's pretty easy in my experience to work long hours on things that are intellectually engaging. It's the stuff which is frustrating and causes stress/burnout that is hard to work on all the time. I could easily spend 50 hours a week building a compiler but not 50 hours a week writing google docs, sitting in meetings, and talking to people - that would kill me.
No, he doesn't. Right after the quote you have:
> No, it just means that focusing on a single thing for an extended period of time is challenging.
YMMV I guess, but I'd be surprised if anyone's programming neurons are replenished by memes. Maybe by a nice movie.
Mental faculties are like muscle in that they get tired and need rest. A difference is that it's easy to sense how tired muscles are and hard to sense how tired the mind is.
Because I haven't done an RCT, there are potential confounds. Perhaps I'm more likely to reddit (vs go outside) when I'm lower on energy to begin with. And there's a lot of noise, and the metrics are subjective.
Also: relaxing takes some practice. One can sit in a beautiful place with spa music playing and still have one's mind buzzing, so it wouldn't be restorative. Taking a proper mental rest took me years to get good at.
Another caveat: "mental energy" is a metaphor that may not exactly correspond to something physical like neuron ATP levels or whatever. And there are many parts of the brain, and different activities use different subsets, so activities overlap in strange ways. Still, as far as self-cognitive-science goes, I'm relatively confident in this observation.
If I do focused mental work for even seven hours I'm completely wiped. I absolutely can't read a normal book at that point. Clicking the next meme on reddit is about all I can manage. And yeah, my wife and kids aren't getting a lot from me on those days.
I'm surprised that Carmack seems to find this absurd. Am I super atypical? Or is he? I'm actually curious: after let's say 5 hours of in-person interviews, do most people come home and fire up the CAD software to work on rockets or whatever, like Carmack, or do they hang out on the couch vegetating and feeling like they have a minor hangover or head cold, like me?