Crunch mode only works for when the finish line is in sight.
Instead of a 40 hour week, you find out you are within 50 hours of the goal. So you ask the team to come in for 60 hours that week, get 50 effective hours, and give everyone time off the week after to recover.
That's not what happens once you have the crunch mode button installed, though.
I used to live with a banker. He'd sit at the office all day, and at about 6pm his boss would come back from meetings, and demand slides be ready for the next morning. So the little bankers would be sitting in the office from about 9am to midnight. This went on for years. Same with weekends and presumed nights off: someone would see it fit to phone the analysts on their night off to have them correct the font on a slide deck.
Ultimately, this wears down everyone. People get stressed when there's no end in sight. The bad kind of stress that makes you lose your hair and your sanity.
I have this experience working in academia too. Closer to paper submission, all the coauthors work longer days. Emails at midnight and sometimes even Zoom calls at ungodly hours are not unheard of. But once the paper is submitted, usually things slow down.
The people who don't slow down, usually end up burned out quickly. Their research suffers and it shows up in the quality of their work. Then the papers get rejected more often, which puts them more under pressure. It becomes a vicious cycle.
This is missing one extremely cynical interpretation.
What if the output isn’t the real goal, it’s having a workforce that thinks more like footsoldiers than professionals?
Of course 2x hustle doesn’t scale to 2x output, you can’t tell me that all these smart people are just ignorant of that. It has to be a different thing getting selected for.
This is why I'm not a consultant. It's a generalization, but there's a kind of learned helplessness almost in the culture of the big4. Client has a new requirement, and someone says "oh guess it'll be an allnighter, i'll start ordering pizzas". Nah man, this is like four extra hours of work- push the deadline, or just work smarter.
I've averaged 60-hour weeks for a year and a half, with bursts up to 90 hours. I only did it because we were working on new tech at the time, and I figured it was worth it to my long-term value as a programmer. I'd never do it in some stale tech.
Also there was camaraderie. If I didn't like my coworkers, I never would have gone through it. We certainly didn't do it to make our bosses happy. In a weird way we almost had this attitude like we were doing it to spite our bosses. Like: "We'll build this thing for you, but you better stay out of our way. Your job is to clear obstacles for us when we need it, and otherwise don't tell us how to do our jobs." Luckily our bosses were smart enough to just let us cook and not ruin our morale by micromanaging.
The NBA legend Bill Russell said his dad told him, "Son, if the man asks you for 8 hours, give him 9. That way you can look any man on the job site straight in the eye and tell him to go hell." I like that attitude.
I'm still friends with many of those coworkers, even though we haven't worked together since 2017. It's a bit like (I assume) sharing a foxhole in war. You'll always have that bond.
No boss will ever pay you enough to retire. Ten million is retire-this-afternoon money.
Especially a boss talking about 50 hour work weeks. If there's really ten million in it, hire my friend and we'll each get five million and boss gets 80 dev-hours of really solid work per week
Oh they won't do that? Maybe it's cause they're BSing up their own book
A sizeable chunk of well-recognised founders are simply scammers - they take VC money, sell dreams to customers, and exploit engineers as a necessary step to keep the ball rolling.
Think of the operation of a pump and dump with extra steps. The mission is never about creating value, it's about pumping expectations and pulling the rug at the right time.
Maybe a few of them live in the delusion of improving society with their products, but even then, the fact that they don't give a damn about the quality delivered to customers (or are qualified to make any technical judgement) makes them de facto scammers.
That's why the real total compensation from a startup is salary and experience. Does this look good on my resume? Will I learn something I want to learn? Will I be saving money here?
Stocks are worthless. If the company thought their stock was worth anything they wouldn't be giving it away to employees
Fermi estimate - doubling my work hours will also halve my waking free time. Doubling my work hours as an individual contributor will not make the company twice as productive. It will not make my stocks worth twice as much.
Does anyone else see the math this way? Employee stock ownership does not give you linear returns with hours worked.
> Fermi estimate - doubling my work hours will also halve my waking free time.
40h work. 56h sleep. 72h free time.
80h work. 56h sleep. 32h free time.
Ok fair enough close enough to half I though the share would be worse. But in practice, your energy is spent and the free time will suck. Also a reasonable commute of 8h will make the share 64 to 24, a 'third'.
Yeah the thing with stocks is you have to be in a very tiny company or a critical executive for your individual positive contribution to the value of your shares to be even worth thinking about. Maybe it works psychologically on employees even though it's pretty irrational.
>> The lottery is, famously, a tax on people who don’t understand probability
I buy lottery tickets. Usually if I'm at the grocery store, I'll buy one.
I have some understanding of probability. I have a minor in math, I took a graduate combinatorics class. Given the rules of a specific lottery I can tell you the odds of winning it, the expected value of a ticket, and back when I was taking that combinatorics class, I could have given you a proof of those odds. Probably couldn't do the proofs now.
I also took economics classes. I remember having a discussion in micro on the conditions under which it would be rational for someone to play the lottery. They're pretty obvious.
There's a condition called "engineer's disease". One symptom of that terrible terrible disease (along with a general disgust with humor and sarcasm) is that everything under discussion must be converted into the nearest available math problem. I think, sad to say, that the person who originated your famous quote probably had a bit of that condition.
Or maybe I'm just a stupid guy who buys lottery tickets because he can't math.
If the leaders of these companies actually cared about worker productivity, they would grab the low-hanging fruit and give their employees workspaces where they can concentrate, not crowded open-plan offices surrounded by meeting rooms.
Wall Street and the big corporate law firms of NYC/DC have been championing extreme hours since the 1980s. Maybe earlier. So it's interesting to see the short- and long-term effects of this on people's lives.
Informal assessment here, re: how these versions of "hustle culture" have played out. First, people who can last a long time do make a lot of money. Second, the wipe-out rate is pronounced but not catastrophic. Yes, there's sometimes a price to pay in terms of bad marriages, early heart attacks, etc. but it's not so pervasive that everyone who chases all-out success comes up short. You can win at this game.
Third -- and this perhaps OPs best area for questioning: When you work 90-hour weeks, your judgment about picking the right projects goes to hell. You're the greyhound going round the track as fast as you can, chasing the rabbit that you'll never catch. Your rabbit-value assessment system doesn't exist. You just keep running toward whatever someone else points you toward. On Wall Street, a lot of marathon hours are spent trying to close deals that won't close. Or that turn out to have been identifiable mistakes/misguided obsessions.
I was chatting earlier this year with a former Big Law attorney who spent a frenzied year after Hurricane Katrina drafting blizzards of legal filings so that big insurers could dodge claims. Her work was valued enough that she (and her firm) got paid a lot and maybe even did landmark work. Nearly 20 years later, is that the career badge that you'll always feel good about?
> Nearly 20 years later, is that the career badge that you'll always feel good about?
Well, if the result work has negative connotations, you wouldn't even mention it (especially after 20 years). However, as you said:
> enough that she (and her firm) got paid a lot and maybe even did landmark work
At the end of the day, that's what mostly matters. Sure, some people believe in what they are doing and put insane hours, but most just do it for money. And if they manage to get a lot, then yeah, it was all justified.
---
> Second, the wipe-out rate is pronounced but not catastrophic
I agree with this -- people who are deeply invested in their projects are often already do the second shift. So if you are motivated enough, that's kind of the same, plus people can be in a position where they have no external obligations (often when they are young).
It is bad long-term, but for a relatively short term for many it is a decent gamble.
Readit News
Instead of a 40 hour week, you find out you are within 50 hours of the goal. So you ask the team to come in for 60 hours that week, get 50 effective hours, and give everyone time off the week after to recover.
That's not what happens once you have the crunch mode button installed, though.
I used to live with a banker. He'd sit at the office all day, and at about 6pm his boss would come back from meetings, and demand slides be ready for the next morning. So the little bankers would be sitting in the office from about 9am to midnight. This went on for years. Same with weekends and presumed nights off: someone would see it fit to phone the analysts on their night off to have them correct the font on a slide deck.
Ultimately, this wears down everyone. People get stressed when there's no end in sight. The bad kind of stress that makes you lose your hair and your sanity.
The people who don't slow down, usually end up burned out quickly. Their research suffers and it shows up in the quality of their work. Then the papers get rejected more often, which puts them more under pressure. It becomes a vicious cycle.
And, ultimately, your life. I‘d assume that no company is worth dying for, blatantly speaking. Especially so, if it’s not your own.
What if the output isn’t the real goal, it’s having a workforce that thinks more like footsoldiers than professionals?
Of course 2x hustle doesn’t scale to 2x output, you can’t tell me that all these smart people are just ignorant of that. It has to be a different thing getting selected for.
Also there was camaraderie. If I didn't like my coworkers, I never would have gone through it. We certainly didn't do it to make our bosses happy. In a weird way we almost had this attitude like we were doing it to spite our bosses. Like: "We'll build this thing for you, but you better stay out of our way. Your job is to clear obstacles for us when we need it, and otherwise don't tell us how to do our jobs." Luckily our bosses were smart enough to just let us cook and not ruin our morale by micromanaging.
The NBA legend Bill Russell said his dad told him, "Son, if the man asks you for 8 hours, give him 9. That way you can look any man on the job site straight in the eye and tell him to go hell." I like that attitude.
I'm still friends with many of those coworkers, even though we haven't worked together since 2017. It's a bit like (I assume) sharing a foxhole in war. You'll always have that bond.
> It's a bit like (I assume) sharing a foxhole in war. You'll always have that bond.
What is up with the romance? Nothing makes people as numb as being dragged into a trench and waiting for the shell with your name on it.
I'm cynical enough to think that such $10M will be fake money.
It will be diluted or in some other way made into nothing.
No boss will ever pay you enough to retire. Ten million is retire-this-afternoon money.
Especially a boss talking about 50 hour work weeks. If there's really ten million in it, hire my friend and we'll each get five million and boss gets 80 dev-hours of really solid work per week
Oh they won't do that? Maybe it's cause they're BSing up their own book
Think of the operation of a pump and dump with extra steps. The mission is never about creating value, it's about pumping expectations and pulling the rug at the right time.
Maybe a few of them live in the delusion of improving society with their products, but even then, the fact that they don't give a damn about the quality delivered to customers (or are qualified to make any technical judgement) makes them de facto scammers.
Stocks are worthless. If the company thought their stock was worth anything they wouldn't be giving it away to employees
Most VC backed companies are not strapped for money, they are often drowning in money.
Family run business are often strapped for money but they would also like to NOT give stocks away.
Hustle culture is a tax on people who think they will always be in the top 0.01% if they just manifest hard enough.
Fermi estimate - doubling my work hours will also halve my waking free time. Doubling my work hours as an individual contributor will not make the company twice as productive. It will not make my stocks worth twice as much.
Does anyone else see the math this way? Employee stock ownership does not give you linear returns with hours worked.
40h work. 56h sleep. 72h free time.
80h work. 56h sleep. 32h free time.
Ok fair enough close enough to half I though the share would be worse. But in practice, your energy is spent and the free time will suck. Also a reasonable commute of 8h will make the share 64 to 24, a 'third'.
I buy lottery tickets. Usually if I'm at the grocery store, I'll buy one.
I have some understanding of probability. I have a minor in math, I took a graduate combinatorics class. Given the rules of a specific lottery I can tell you the odds of winning it, the expected value of a ticket, and back when I was taking that combinatorics class, I could have given you a proof of those odds. Probably couldn't do the proofs now.
I also took economics classes. I remember having a discussion in micro on the conditions under which it would be rational for someone to play the lottery. They're pretty obvious.
There's a condition called "engineer's disease". One symptom of that terrible terrible disease (along with a general disgust with humor and sarcasm) is that everything under discussion must be converted into the nearest available math problem. I think, sad to say, that the person who originated your famous quote probably had a bit of that condition.
Or maybe I'm just a stupid guy who buys lottery tickets because he can't math.
Informal assessment here, re: how these versions of "hustle culture" have played out. First, people who can last a long time do make a lot of money. Second, the wipe-out rate is pronounced but not catastrophic. Yes, there's sometimes a price to pay in terms of bad marriages, early heart attacks, etc. but it's not so pervasive that everyone who chases all-out success comes up short. You can win at this game.
Third -- and this perhaps OPs best area for questioning: When you work 90-hour weeks, your judgment about picking the right projects goes to hell. You're the greyhound going round the track as fast as you can, chasing the rabbit that you'll never catch. Your rabbit-value assessment system doesn't exist. You just keep running toward whatever someone else points you toward. On Wall Street, a lot of marathon hours are spent trying to close deals that won't close. Or that turn out to have been identifiable mistakes/misguided obsessions.
I was chatting earlier this year with a former Big Law attorney who spent a frenzied year after Hurricane Katrina drafting blizzards of legal filings so that big insurers could dodge claims. Her work was valued enough that she (and her firm) got paid a lot and maybe even did landmark work. Nearly 20 years later, is that the career badge that you'll always feel good about?
Well, if the result work has negative connotations, you wouldn't even mention it (especially after 20 years). However, as you said:
> enough that she (and her firm) got paid a lot and maybe even did landmark work
At the end of the day, that's what mostly matters. Sure, some people believe in what they are doing and put insane hours, but most just do it for money. And if they manage to get a lot, then yeah, it was all justified.
---
> Second, the wipe-out rate is pronounced but not catastrophic
I agree with this -- people who are deeply invested in their projects are often already do the second shift. So if you are motivated enough, that's kind of the same, plus people can be in a position where they have no external obligations (often when they are young).
It is bad long-term, but for a relatively short term for many it is a decent gamble.