>> And if you go in on a Saturday afternoon, I can tell you which startups will succeed, without even knowing what they do. Being there on the weekend is a huge indicator of success, mostly because these companies just don’t happen. They happen because of really hard work.
Do people still think you can get away with 40-50 hours when the next guy is just as good as you and putting in 80?
There are times in a startup when it is a race. Those working 80 will beat those working 40. Can those working 80 do that forever? No, but if it helps them put the ones working 40 out of business they do not need to work 80 forever.
I think the real key is recognizing when working more will help.
Basically most of the companies mentioned in Founders at Work.[1]
There are several common themes to why all those companies had to put in crazy hours but one theme that sticks out is the "oh shit, the user count is growing like crazy and we've got to scale out our servers to handle the exponential workload like YESTERDAY or we're going to DIE!"
It happened to the Youtube engineers, Google, Napster, Etsy, etc. It's a stressful combination of fighting fires and adding capacity at the same time.
For horizontal scaling re-architecting & re-engineering, there is no commercial off-the-shelf or open-source software that let's you install it in one afternoon such that all programmers can just work 40 hours a week without a hiccup. Today, you can't just install a distributed database like Cassandra and fire up more AWS instances and assume those newer technologies that the previous Founders at Work didn't have will prevent your employees from putting in 80 hour weeks for months.
Going from a single instance database to handle 10k to 100k users to a sharded distributed db to handle 100 million is not going to be a 40-hour a week job for startup employees. If any companies have done it with zero overtime, please write a blog highlighting your user traffic growth, database sizes, and migration strategy. That would be a very impressive achievement.
I agree completely. I've been is software for over 10 years now and barring a few extreme outliers most people do not have 80 productive hours in them every week unless they literally do nothing else. And even then, it cannot last.
There is a place for hard work. And it is certainly a factor in success, but working nights and weekends only gets you so far and there is a significant diminishing return. Go through a code base and look at commits made past midnight, or 8+ hours into a shift. They are going to lead to more regression issues and technical debt nine times out of ten.
Considering all the tone-deaf ham-fisted nonsense that's come out about Mayer's management style while she was at yahoo, I'm surprised people will still listen to this nonsense. It's just a bunch of people following their selection bias into a cult of personality.
Sure, but doing what? And can you get a whole team of them?
I very very much doubt you can when it comes to programming. I've been doing this for almost two decades and in this time have only known ONE person who might fit the bill.
I dunno, early Id Software seems like a good example. Personally, I think it directly relates to having people do something their passionate about.
20, 40, 80 hours...doesn't matter, getting a group of programmers excited and passionate about getting a taxi from point A to point B is probably unlikely.
But get a group of people who grew up playing D&D and tell them to make it real...
Sometimes you don't have a choice. Pierre Omidyar worked on eBay on weekends and in the middle of the night to keep the site running because of growth and troubleshooting problems.
Yeah because the guy who is putting in 80 hours per week will have issues in physical and mental health, marriage, sleep, social life, etc. Better work sustainable and look further than next week.
If they are working insane hours: you can assume its more likely they aren't getting a lot of physical activity, they are probably eating out a lot, and are getting less sleep.
How would you expect that person to have less physical issues?
Anecdotally, people who I've seen struggling with an 8 hour day tend to be less healthy (overweight, poor eating habits....). Whereas people who exercise more tend to have more energy.
Anecdotally, I've seen out-of-shape couch potatoes to be best prepared for the challenge of sitting all day and coding with junk food and soda. It's much more of a shock to the system of somebody with healthy habits.
Only read the last one (since I was specifically curious about health). Mostly seems related to shift work "and the night shift"...which I'd say isn't directly related, but nonetheless interesting. Thanks.
Have you ever done nothing but code for weeks on end? 7am-1am usually, though 8am-2am and 9am-3am are popular. You get bathroom breaks, some small parts of your commute when you can't physically be coding or communicating, and maybe some spare moments around meals (generally you work through them though), so you're looking at 16-17 hour days overall. That puts you at 80 hours before you've hit the weekend, so 100 overall is not unreasonable.
At least in my experience, no amount of pride or grit can prevent you from crumbling if you do this for more than a few weeks. The physical aspects are somewhat noticeable but can be mitigated with a little exercise, good posture, alternating work positions, and so on. I found the real price is paid mentally. You lose control of your emotions and work becomes the center of your world to an unhealthy degree. A frustration that impedes your work becomes a mental disaster. You lose a sense of who you are, drowned in the work. You start to take pride in being this code machine. I sleep very little as it is, and can only imagine the havoc this would wreak one somebody who needs their 6-8 hours.
When you surface, the return to reality can be jarring and embarrassing. It happens when the project fails, or is hugely delayed for causes outside of your control, or the business is acquired, or what have you: The reality sets in that you were burning the candle at both ends and getting upset for absolutely no reason. You realize that your pride, your perceived grit, not only was futile with regard to the project, but was really a protective mechanism. Vanity carried the day. That is just plain crushing for your self-esteem, and I wouldn't wish it on anybody.
First of all, the vast majority of us are not John Carmack. Second, his comment discusses the merits of working short versus long hours. That's a world apart from spending every waking hour on work, which is what Mayer advocates here (especially with the mention of all-nighters). Either way, I would've appreciated if you wrote your own reply.
Outliers exist, and you can build a team of them (it's been done, it will be done). The "trick" is to get people to "work" on something they love doing and are proud of.
Also, and Carmack nails it, people are different. You might think it's unhealthy, or unnatural, but some people are obsessive, perfectionist, focused or just really passionate about something. Also, some people are just better organized. Again, Carmack's right, you probably can't be at your peak for extended periods of time, but there's plenty of things you can get done that don't require your peak.
When this issue is raised from concern of people being taken advantage of, fine, I agree. But just because some people can't do it, doesn't mean no one can (just look at the extreme range of physical and creative abilities that people have). And, like all other life style choices, what's the point of judging other people?
No, I still disagree with you. Carmack is the outlier of the outlier and not a useful example. To be able to get and keep a team of those people would be the opportunity of a lifetime.
Keep in mind that I'm the sort of person you are indicating already. I sleep little and don't care much about work/life balance. When I've worked on teams that are burning the candle at both ends, I am able to hold out longer than others and usually end up carrying things over the finish line.
That's the point of my comment: Even for those who ought to thrive, things start to break down, and no amount of energy or toughness changes that. We are human. I want to warn/remind other engineers that these practices are unsustainable. Hell, I want to remind myself of that after repeating this work to the bone/burnout cycle so many times.
over 5 years? hell no, life is too short to work that hard for that long for a maybe. Maybe I'm too old and cynical but the likelihood that your startup actually makes it is so small. I call bullshit on any metrics that say working weekends is an indicator of success. I have been there to no avail, I know a lot of people that have been in those weekend passionate drive positions and where are they now? We are still working hard, but more sustainably and for better pay, we don't have the big payout carrot anymore but honestly this is way better for my sanity and health.
I don't think this has anything to do with working harder. The startups are working on the weekend because they are succeeding, they aren't succeeding because they are working on the weekends.
When you are in a startup that has found a market, and all you have to do is ship the next MVP and you can start printing money, you're pretty motivated to work weekends to make that happen faster, even if it's a bad idea.
I would guess that these successful startups could stop working weekends, change their culture to focus on measuring value and deliverables, and still be successful.
That's it exactly. In some companies you work on the weekend because you promised something to a customer and the deadline is tight. Or because something went wrong because of customer load.
That's good weekend work; they happened because of success so they don't have the same mental load and they tend to be sporadic so you get recovery time.
Bad weekend work is caused by relentless internal pressure. That's counter-productive.
1) They are passionate about their product.
2) They have an 'oh shit' deadline due soon.
3) They had nothing else better to do and enjoy their coworkers.
I've been in the all 3 situations before. To believe being there on a weekend for one reason, and one reason only, shows her myopia. If her indicator of success is the # of hours you put in, it explains why her turnaround failed...
And how long will that guy last before he totally burns out and starts producing shitty, unreliable code? Not to mention being tired and pissed all the time and impossible to work with...
Amount of value being created and number of hours being put in is not neccessarily proportional, even if the people in question have similar skill level (or are actually the same guy/girl). What you do, what you don't do, where you decide to cut corners, and where you decide to go full in, counts as much as raw effort and skill.
Now, if everyone would make ideal strategic choices and the whole thing would be a zero-sum game, then I'd agree with you, the ones that put in more time would reap more benefit. But looking around me (admittedly, far away from SV, in a backwater Eastern European country), that doesn't look to be the case.
Quick count, how many of you (us) are reading HN and counting that in work time?
Of course. Mayer's quote is a vapid corporate platitude. Hours have no correlation to value.
What really creates value is smart, prophetic strategy and effective management. Hours are a resource guided by strategy and management, not an end in themselves.
If your strategy is clueless and your management is intrusive, all you're doing is wasting everyone's time - and 80 hour weeks won't help you.
"True" startups (let's say, founders and maybe one other employee) have a lot of work to do that doesn't take your full mental firepower. Paperwork, polishing, selling, attending various things and marketing, etc. A "true" startup doesn't have everybody spending their 80 hours heads-down on technical coding.
I do agree that you can't code for 80 hours straight for weeks on end, but "80 hours of work" isn't necessarily that. I also agree that it's still stressful even so, and I wouldn't recommend living that way for years on end, but younger folk can afford it for a while.
Success isn't static, 'indicator' doesn't mean 'definition', and correlation is not causation.
In other words, success for one startup doesn't mean success for another (let alone personal success). Working weekends doesn't mean you'll succeed, and vice versa. And working crazy hours doesn't mean that's why you succeeded.
> Do people still think you can get away with 40-50 hours when the next guy is just as good as you and putting in 80?
The 80-hour guy's personal ROI is half that of the 40-hour guy. Meaning the return has to be twice as good to justify his additional time investment. This is great for the company, but terrible for the individual.
I'd retort: do people still think that working 80 hour weeks makes you more productive than working 50 hour weeks? [1] [2] [3]
In a startup, your competitive advantage is rarely going to be how many hours you work - how can it be, when you're playing against large well-capitalized companies that can assign entire teams at the drop of a hat and thereby outwork you tenfold? Rather, you rely on some combination of:
- underdoing the competition (you can't do everything as 1-10 people, so you have to fail and iterate quickly with minimal effort and learn as much as you can from each iteration);
- personal / professional connections (OK, so you can spend more time here, but it's often not going to be behind a computer or at the office, and it will be very hard to measure productivity-wise);
- blind luck (which isn't in your control anyways, so don't waste your time trying);
- the innovator's dilemma (which isn't really in your control either, but gives you a several-year headstart while larger companies slowly figure out that your market is lucrative enough for them to bother with).
Finally: from personal experience, the productivity gains of working 80 hour weeks are illusory. I make more mistakes, incur more technical debt, work on fewer of the right problems and more of the wrong ones, take on stress that impacts my decision-making and communication skills...
marissa mayer values hours at work; she'd better because she's logged a lot and accomplished basically nothing as yahoo's "boss". below the article, stan lee talks about bosses:
"What’s the worst advice you ever got?
Listen to what your boss tells you. My boss never liked the idea of Spider-Man. He didn’t want to do it. I had to sneak Spider-Man into another book, over my boss’s head. Experts really know nothing."
There are some mothers who want to work; there are some mothers who need to work; there are some mothers who want to stay home; there are some mothers who need to stay home
Interesting quote from the boss that banned working from home!
I think you're reaching. A person could say, "Some people need to use drugs, some don't" and still be either for or against drugs. Or could run a company that bans or allows drug usage.
Because this is the woman who had a nursery built in her office so that someone would attend to her kids while she worked, while at the same time not extending this same courtesy to any of her female employees.
Cutting off the ability to work remotely, which is how most people who cannot afford child care manage small children, sends the message that she is uniquely allowed to work and be a mom, while everyone else can pound sand.
"Cutting off the ability to work remotely, which is how most people who cannot afford child care manage small children" Not in the slightest. The lower one's income, the lower the chance that they will be allowed to work remotely. You can't work at McDonalds remotely.
Regardless of income, there's no reason to force developers to be on site. That Mayer went to such great lengths to have her preferred childcare setup at work but didn't extend any options to other parents is extremely poor leadership.
>Cutting off the ability to work remotely, which is how most people who cannot afford child care manage small children
I haven't seen anyone who can look after a small child and work at the same time. Either you're working or looking after the child.
On the other hand if your argument is that Yahoo should have offered discounted childcare on onsite that Marissa received, then your argument makes perfect sense.
I don't agree, particularly for a developer role. I've known developers who worked remotely specifically for this reason, that they could not afford daycare. Developers tend to be tracked more based on hours logged into a project than being in one's desk from 9-5, so the general concensus was that if they punched in their 40 hours and met deadlines, no one really cared where those 40 hours came from.
>Cutting off the ability to work remotely, which is how most people who cannot afford child care manage small children
I haven't seen anyone who can look after a small child and work at the same time. Either you're working or looking after the child.
On the other hand if your argument is that Yahoo should have offered discounted childcare on onsite that Marissa received, then your argument makes perfect sense.
I can get upset about executives being paid many times more than regular employees, but I don't care of they trade some of that enormous pay for special perks.
The bit she has in here about knowing which companies will succeed based on who's there on the weekends is such a crock of shit. It's like she's saying all the ones that failed it's because the people involved didn't work hard enough. That is so condescending and insulting.
Start ups fail for all kinds of reasons, sure sometimes it's because people didn't work hard enough. But not remotely always. Sometimes an idea just doesn't pan out. Sometimes people get screwed by a bad choice, sometimes that bad choice was made because they were working so hard they weren't thinking straight.
Any kind of statement like saying that you can tell which start ups will succeed or fail based on a single criteria is just hubris and obviously wrong.
I agree. The difference between 40-80 a week isn't that much when you can consider some places you can get by doing just a few hours of work. If you create an atmosphere where people are excited to work then you are perhaps 20x more productive than some other companies.
when i graduated from college, the ibank analysts were the ones declaring "120 hour work weeks!". none of them worked that much, but it's funny that the lie has gotten even bigger ("130!").
My comment was made in the context of her entire tenure. Though I think she said plenty about her definition of success and hard work in this interview to justify my statement.
It's hilarious is that Marissa Mayer has this "work all the time and you'll succeed ethos."
Meanwhile Yahoo's office are still empty from people that work from home and most people on cruise control. I've never met a workaholic from Yahoo. Any person worth their salt was gone long ago. The rest are there because why quit a plum cruise control gig.
> But I would never have a five-year plan. If I’d stuck to my original five-year plan when I was 18, I would have missed every great thing that ever happened to me.
_____
As someone who just created the general outline of a five-year plan (my first one), I'm wondering what other HNers have to say about the subject.
"Plans are useless. Planning is vital." -- attr. Eisenhower.
That is, you need to do the planning to look around and see e.g. what your strengths/weaknesses/opportunities/threats are, what your objectives are, and what direction to set out in. Otherwise you run the risk of paralysis or being permanently behind events.
On the other hand, reality deviates from the plan immediately, for better or for worse. But at least you have the information gathered from the planning phase to re-plan from.
Haha, nothing wrong with making plans and adding some focus to life, but realize that "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans" and don't skip great and fun opportunities because of your plan, that's all.
I've never planned that far out. I've had hopes for 5 years out but never plans. Even a year out a ludicrous to me. I may plan things a few months out but even that is begging for plans to be broken. But I'm a somewhat spontaneous person and don't like rigidity in my life even if it's self imposed.
5 year plans for execution or term planning is hard hard. Peter Drucker says 18-months is the right term, I largely agree with that. Life is not a constant, and 5 years into future is a bit hard to predict unless you are in Geopolitical prediction business. I do not know much about business, since I am not a business owner nor wear an executive suit.
There is a difference between plans and goals. Many times a five year will need to change drastically and often without changing the overall goal.
A plan isn't a bad thing but being overly committed to it can be fatal. One of the things about publishing a five year plan for a company is that you are usually judged in the markets by how closely you stuck to and succeeded in that plan. In tech, and probably most other industries as well, that can be fatal. Publishing a goal is a little less fatal since it doesn't outline a series of steps toward reaching that goal and allows you flexibility to pivot. Assuming of course that you didn't phrase your goal in the form of a plan or get too specific or detailed.
From personal experience 5 year goals/plans can help to give you a very broad outlook on where you want to get to, but be prepared to tear them up every 2-3 years ;)
When I look back to 2011 I'd never have guessed that I would be where I am, doing what I do, today. I'm confident I'll be able to say the same in 2021.
My parents grew up with the "one-company-for-life" mentality, but I'm a firm believer that it's good to mix things up every few years to keep yourself fresh and motivated. That's not to say you should abandon something that you're truly passionate about if you continue to derive long-term enjoyment from it, but rather be open and flexible to new opportunities as they may take you places you'd never imagine.
I have never made a 5 year plan and looking back over the past 15 years of my business, I am thankful I didn't. At least in my business, there has been a significant cycle that seems to happen about every 2 years. Meaning a big change happened, the landscape changed, situations changed which forced us to have to react and change very quickly. A 5 year plan or even a 2 year plan would have killed the business long ago.
That similar trend has shown up in my personal life too, although not as often.
A general outline is useful to have. A useful four-year plan is kind of like "graduate from college". Lots of room for improvisation along the way, but the ability to measure if life is headed in the direction you want to be headed.
In practice, I've found it impossible to follow a plan beyond two years due to external factors (friends and co-workers move, industries change, laws change, deaths, etc.). Those external factors seem to speed up with age. However, having a "general outline" (like waypoints on a journey) helps to correct course or select an alternate path when those inevitable changes happen.
Goals are important. Actions are important. Plans are debatable. If every day, you're taking actions that will help you achieve your goals, you'll probably turn out okay.
Boy, I disagree with Mayer's take on sustained crunch => success. But she seems to repeat it.
> When reporters write about Google, they write about it as if it was inevitable. The actual experience was more like, “Could you work 130 hours in a week?” The answer is yes, if you’re strategic about when you sleep, when you shower, and how often you go to the bathroom
This is fine in spurts but doing it on a sustained basis is actually suboptimal. Crunch time for extended periods is bad for problem-solving and for productivity. There are critical periods where it can be productive... when the team is all obsessed in tackling a crisis or timely opportunity. But sustaining this for more than several weeks a year at most in total is actually detrimental.
> I can tell you which startups will succeed, without even knowing what they do. Being there on the weekend is a huge indicator of success
No. This is not true. At best, this is a gross oversimplification.
And it's disheartening to see Mayer hammering this single point over and over. It almost seems like a point of pride for her... which leads to:
> There was a moment when someone said to me, “Wow, you might be the busiest person on the planet.” In the Midwest, where I grew up, you shrug off a compliment like that and think a lot of people in the world are really busy, like President Obama. And then President Obama started posting YouTube videos for fun.
Alright, douchey-ness of this humble brag (let alone humble-brag in even glancing comparing yourself to the POTUS) aside, this underscores again the obsession with hours worked. I just vehemently disagree with this. Valuable output and quality matter most, not hours worked. It's highly questionable to claim that more hours worked leads to greater overall value of output. Beyond some threshold (which I believe varies person by person), there is an asymptotic incremental contribution to total valuable output. And at some point, total value of output declines, where the incremental contribution of more time worked in a given period is negative.
This is an unhealthy and unhelpful view.
Moving onto totally different topics...
> > Does it bother you that your parenting choices were criticized?
> In my view, there’s just entirely too much judgment over motherhood...
Here, here! Totally agree.
> I would never have a five-year plan. If I’d stuck to my original five-year plan when I was 18, I would have missed every great thing that ever happened to me.
Agree very much again. I think you can have high-level achievement goals, but not a specific destination or path laid out for getting there. Having fungible plans is usually wisest because every day you have more information than you did before and every day you have a chance of encountering a previously unknown opportunity. Need to be open to leveraging that information and those opportunities when it's called for, as opposed to sticking to a rigid plan.
> We had shareholders with two different priorities. We have some people who owned Yahoo stock because they really cared about digital advertising and the internet and a possible turnaround there. And we had another set of stakeholders who owned it because they saw a lot of positive transactions that could happen with these very large, lucrative Asian assets. And we had duties to both as the executive team of the company.
That is totally fair. I think Mayer's biggest failing was not recognizing this early enough and not being proactive enough about resolving it. It was a disaster waiting to happen. She and the company seemed very focused on the turnaround early on, and overly committed to holding the assets together. Recognizing from the get go that Yahoo had different shareholder groups -- and in particular that Yahoo was or easily could become the target of activist investors -- it is surprising that this wasn't addressed boldly, head-on, quickly.
the funny thing is that, imagine business is a car and CEO is the driver. if you step on gas (working harder) but heading toward the wrong direction, you would end up further away from the destination.
to me Mayer is saying Yahoo did not get over the hump cause they dont have enough determination, while failed to acknowledge that she drove them the wrong direction past few years.
“Could you work 130 hours in a week?” The answer is yes, if you’re strategic about when you sleep, when you shower, and how often you go to the bathroom. The nap rooms at Google were there because it was safer to stay in the office than walk to your car at 3 a.m. For my first five years, I did at least one all-nighter a week
Really? I always thought that pulling all-nighters hurts more than it helps. Optimizing your bathroom breaks seems really silly to me.
It absolutely is unhelpful in anything more than short bursts. It is very odd how obsessed she seems with hours-worked.
Mayer is someone who proclaims to believe in the power of data. I'm curious then what data she has to back her views on crunch==maximization of value creation. Most of the data I've seen says the opposite. It seems Mayer may be letting her anecdotal experience in the early days of Google trump data here. (A it's also possible that anyone, including Mayer, can have misperceived or misattributed the importance of sustained crunch in those days or its causative effect on success.)
I've noticed the obsession about hours worked tends to correlate with insecurities surrounding competence.
Managers who were acutely aware of how little they understood about what went on underneath them tended to be the ones who spent the most time in the office and who cared most about what time people came/left.
They also tend to be the ones who are the most against remote working.
Agreed. A good indicator of that is when you start micromanaging your bathroom breaks, i.e. when not only your mental life but also your bodily functions get subordinated to corporate success.
Fair enough, but that doesn't answer the core question -- was she actually productive during that time or was a lot of that playing with her kids, reading the news, having her brain go in circles because she's exhausted and not thinking clearly, thinking about her next bathroom break, etc.
My intuition is that for the typical person, it hurts more than it helps.
But life is unfair, and there probably are some people legitimately can put in 130 hours of net-positive work for extended periods of time. And presumably, these people will be disproportionately represented among the "successful".
Another issue is it seems like it'd be hard to tell while you're pulling those ridiculous hours whether or not you're part of the "lucky" subset that actually continues to be productive.
I don't deny that she was "doing work" during 130 hours a week, but I question what she was doing or how productive it really was. I don't see why this is a thing to gloat about. And my take on Yahoo is that it has been lacking a strategic thinker and had unfortunately been saddled with numerous scattered-brained ideas that sound good over a lunch discussion, but cannot be tied to a central plan for the business with a straight face.
The hours she is working immediately says to me that she is not capable of hiring good people and delegating responsibilities. Now, I don't expect a CEO of a large company to work a 40 hour work week, but 130 hours is ridiculous. Out of that 130 hours of work, none of that could have been delegated? Is she really that special that only she can handle it?
> If I’d stuck to my original five-year plan
> when I was 18, I would have missed every
> great thing that ever happened to me.
I'm not a fan of five-year plans, or any x-year plans, but this sounds very passive - in the sense of 'happened to me'.
Which sounds out of place in the context of the other advice <sic> provided - such as 'work Saturdays to guarantee success', 'make a choice and stick to it and make it great', 'it's safer to keep working than walk to your car', and the Alibaba question dodge.
> The other piece that gets overlooked in the Google story is the value of hard work. When reporters write about Google, they write about it as if it was inevitable. The actual experience was more like, “Could you work 130 hours in a week?” The answer is yes, if you’re strategic about when you sleep, when you shower, and how often you go to the bathroom.
You could add to that "and care not a jot about the quality of the decisions you're making."
The other piece that gets overlooked in the Google story is the value of hard work. When reporters write about Google, they write about it as if it was inevitable. The actual experience was more like, “Could you work 130 hours in a week?” The answer is yes, if you’re strategic about when you sleep, when you shower, and how often you go to the bathroom. The nap rooms at Google were there because it was safer to stay in the office than walk to your car at 3 a.m. For my first five years, I did at least one all-nighter a week, except when I was on vacation—and the vacations were few and far between.
My husband [the venture capital investor Zachary Bogue] runs a co-working office in San Francisco. He runs his company out of there and other startups cycle through. And if you go in on a Saturday afternoon, I can tell you which startups will succeed, without even knowing what they do. Being there on the weekend is a huge indicator of success, mostly because these companies just don’t happen. They happen because of really hard work.
This was actually the part I found most surprising and interesting. One the one hand, it's scary that you have to put in insanely long hours like that to succeed. But on the other hand, it's liberating knowing that one of the keys to success, is something everyone has access to.
If some random person had made the above comments, I would have laughed them off as an insane workaholic. But knowing that this advice is coming from someone's who's seen it first hand at early-stage-Google, and many other startups... it's hard to ignore it, no matter how much I may want to.
The amount you work is one of the few variables in your control. I'm still a believer that luck plays a bigger role than most will give credit.
Also, people tend to think they work harder than they actually do. I'm sure they worked hard, but there's almost no chance they were working 130 hour weeks, certainly not consistently. There are only 168 hours in a week. I also don't believe the one all-nighter a week line. Working like this would completely destroy your productivity.
Yep, not just in work, but in personal life too. Everyone is always so "busy" but if you actually probe, it's mostly false or exaggerated. I don't know why having free time is such a dirty word.
Frankly speaking, one all-nighter a week sadly is quite possible for early google employee.
I know of early days operational people (SREs were not a thing yet) need to stay in campus to resolve production issues. They need to stay all-night or come to office in midnight regularly every week.
Watch out for survivorship bias[1]. Business books are full of it: Look only at companies that achieved A, and then find the B they did in common. B must cause A. Ignore the companies that did B and did not achieve A. Ignore the companies that achieved A without doing B.
The "how often you go to the bathroom" line is a pretty big hint that there's some amount of bombast in here. How long does it take to go to the bathroom?
Nonsense. This directly contradicts over 150 years of research that says working over 40 hours a week doesn't lead to increased productivity (and actually hurts it). [0]
In the 19th century, when organized labor first compelled factory owners to limit workdays to 10 (and then eight) hours, management was surprised to discover that output actually increased – and that expensive mistakes and accidents decreased. This is an experiment that Harvard Business School’s Leslie Perlow and Jessica Porter repeated over a century later with knowledge workers. It still held true. Predictable, required time off (like nights and weekends) actually made teams of consultants more productive. [1]
What you're saying is probably true for 99% of workers who work-to-live. If you're someone who's working 80 hour weeks, because of fear/greed, then I agree that your productivity is going to suffer.
But I don't think this is true for the small minority of people who are so passionate about the project, that they are intrinsically motivated to put in insanely long hours. I've experienced such intrinsic motivation during various parts of my own life, and the resulting 80 hour work-weeks that I imposed on myself didn't feel like a productivity drain at all. I think this is what Marissa Meyer and other startup founders are referring to, when they talk about the insanely long hours they worked during the early stages of their company.
That might be true, but I'd like to see research done on that. Regardless, what's clear is that this belief is used to justify overworking the masses: "The Google guys became so successful because they worked 130 hours a week. Why can't you put in a few extra hours a day, Johnny? And while you're at it, pee less often." We need to stop glorifying long hours at the expense of ruining mental/physical health and human relationships (among other things).
If you're putting in 80 hour weeks and feel drained and burnt out, it's not because you're greedy or fearful, it's because human biology puts hard limits on these things.
There are plenty of people who put in 45 hour work-weeks, and then spend another 20-40 hours on hobbies that are extremely cognitively demanding, and still manage to achieve great things during those extra 20-40 hours. It's not a biological limit, it's a motivation/passion limit.
I am very suspect of 130 hours/week being sustainable at a level of quality anyone would appreciate. I do think it's easier to achieve in a management position. I don't see how a developer can be productive working those hours regularly. But the article seems to imply you should be ready to work that many hours all the time, not during crunch times to get things launched. The latter is definitely possible.
But maybe this is just one of those legendary questions people ask to weed out those who would immediately balk because they want to have a life outside of work.
> In the Midwest, where I grew up, you shrug off a compliment like that and think a lot of people in the world are really busy, like President Obama. And then President Obama started posting YouTube videos for fun.
I have nothing against Marissa Mayer and some respects really appreciate having a prominent female CEO but did anyone else find that shocking that she would say that? I mean she is a CEO. Wouldn't she want to avoid talking about US political figures. Also I'm not really sure if it is a dig or a compliment. It could be a compliment. Lots of busy people can have the facade of looking like they have relaxing lives which takes even more work.
There is also an intensity factor of work. Some work is insanely intense both physically and mentally and you just can't do 130 hours. I did consulting for 40 hours a month for a brief period. Those 40 hours felt like 40 hours a week. Meanwhile I worked on my own startup and early in its fledgling years my wife complained about how many hours I worked (she claims more than 90 hours) but to me it felt like 40 hour work week.
> My husband [the venture capital investor Zachary Bogue] runs a co-working office in San Francisco. He runs his company out of there and other startups cycle through. And if you go in on a Saturday afternoon, I can tell you which startups will succeed, without even knowing what they do. Being there on the weekend is a huge indicator of success, mostly because these companies just don’t happen. They happen because of really hard work.
I bet if you tell me only these three things, I'll have a more accurate prediction of which startups will succeed:
* Founder's parents' income
* Founder's parents' education level
* Number of people with over $1M liquid assets that founder knows or has "social access" to
Woof. Surely there is some in between here. I'm not sure if this was intentional but I don't see why hard work on the part of early startup employees needs to be diminished.
But most startups have hard working early employees - not just the successful ones. Focusing on hard work seems close to a just world fallacy. Ask a billionaire if they got there via hard work. Ask a hard worker if they've got a billion dollars.
Oh, so the secret to success is hard work?! Damn it! I've been such an imbecile over the past 6 years - If I had worked 8 days per week (instead of my usual 7 days), I would have succeeded for sure by now! I guess I'm too lazy.
I really need to get myself a mentor like Marissa Mayer so I can learn about work ethics.
Yes, she doesn't understand that it's not because they're working hard that they succeed. They succeed because they're part of an incubator owned by her husband.
If she thinks the odds are tough in her husband's incubator, wait till she sees how tough it is OUTSIDE of it. I mean it's tough for me not living in SF but I imagine it would be even tougher in places like China - People there probably drive themselves to insanity in the pursuit of success.
If she divorced her husband, the whole incubator (and all startups within) would probably go bankrupt within one year.
I find this to be one of the biggest indicators. I have friends whose parents are extremely wealthy and they tried all sorts of random careers before finally settling on something. For them there was zero real risk since they always had their parents to fall back on. One's dad even told him to come up with a business idea and he would fund it and help him make it happen. Instead he goofed around for awhile, before simply going back to school.
Personally, I'm more irked at potential wasted than jealous. I have no one to fall back on, and that has made me fiercely independent, but also very risk conscious. The good thing is that it is easier than every to bootstrap ideas with minimal time.
Two thirds of the above seem to exist in Denmark (and a few other European countries) with no visible improvements to the entrepreneurial scene (I struggle to come up with a Danish startup success story that's been founded in the last decade or two).
I hate to bring politics into this, but that is why I want to see more government support via healthcare or maybe even a guaranteed living wage. That would allow the floor to not completely destroy you and allow you to take on more risk. It's not a good thing for society if only people from wealth can afford to take risk.
When Silicon Valley talks about "diversity" it is often ethnicity or gender, but diversity of economic background is also important.
I'm currently watching a Stanford class online called blitz scaling and recently saw the class in which they brought in Marissa Mayer. I enjoyed it but it bothers me that a lot of what she says in this interview is word for word the same things she said in the video. Must have a memorized speech for this type of thing.
Until the deal is fully closed, or only ancillary closing conditions remain to be met, she kind of has to say that. Also for her golden parachute to deploy, she has to be let go so she can't sound as if she wants to quit.
Actually stay? I have trouble seeing it. Only if she's got some guaranteed line of sight on the VZW ceo gig, but Armstrong and many others will contend there.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 188 ms ] threadDo people still think you can get away with 40-50 hours when the next guy is just as good as you and putting in 80?
I think the real key is recognizing when working more will help.
There are several common themes to why all those companies had to put in crazy hours but one theme that sticks out is the "oh shit, the user count is growing like crazy and we've got to scale out our servers to handle the exponential workload like YESTERDAY or we're going to DIE!"
It happened to the Youtube engineers, Google, Napster, Etsy, etc. It's a stressful combination of fighting fires and adding capacity at the same time.
For horizontal scaling re-architecting & re-engineering, there is no commercial off-the-shelf or open-source software that let's you install it in one afternoon such that all programmers can just work 40 hours a week without a hiccup. Today, you can't just install a distributed database like Cassandra and fire up more AWS instances and assume those newer technologies that the previous Founders at Work didn't have will prevent your employees from putting in 80 hour weeks for months.
Going from a single instance database to handle 10k to 100k users to a sharded distributed db to handle 100 million is not going to be a 40-hour a week job for startup employees. If any companies have done it with zero overtime, please write a blog highlighting your user traffic growth, database sizes, and migration strategy. That would be a very impressive achievement.
[1] http://www.foundersatwork.com/interviews.html
There is a place for hard work. And it is certainly a factor in success, but working nights and weekends only gets you so far and there is a significant diminishing return. Go through a code base and look at commits made past midnight, or 8+ hours into a shift. They are going to lead to more regression issues and technical debt nine times out of ten.
Considering all the tone-deaf ham-fisted nonsense that's come out about Mayer's management style while she was at yahoo, I'm surprised people will still listen to this nonsense. It's just a bunch of people following their selection bias into a cult of personality.
There are people who can be productive (and happy) working more than 40 hours a week.
I very very much doubt you can when it comes to programming. I've been doing this for almost two decades and in this time have only known ONE person who might fit the bill.
20, 40, 80 hours...doesn't matter, getting a group of programmers excited and passionate about getting a taxi from point A to point B is probably unlikely.
But get a group of people who grew up playing D&D and tell them to make it real...
How would you expect that person to have less physical issues?
Marriage/Family: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jomf.12320/abstra...
Mental Health: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22995130
Physical Health: http://oem.bmj.com/content/58/1/68.full
At least in my experience, no amount of pride or grit can prevent you from crumbling if you do this for more than a few weeks. The physical aspects are somewhat noticeable but can be mitigated with a little exercise, good posture, alternating work positions, and so on. I found the real price is paid mentally. You lose control of your emotions and work becomes the center of your world to an unhealthy degree. A frustration that impedes your work becomes a mental disaster. You lose a sense of who you are, drowned in the work. You start to take pride in being this code machine. I sleep very little as it is, and can only imagine the havoc this would wreak one somebody who needs their 6-8 hours.
When you surface, the return to reality can be jarring and embarrassing. It happens when the project fails, or is hugely delayed for causes outside of your control, or the business is acquired, or what have you: The reality sets in that you were burning the candle at both ends and getting upset for absolutely no reason. You realize that your pride, your perceived grit, not only was futile with regard to the project, but was really a protective mechanism. Vanity carried the day. That is just plain crushing for your self-esteem, and I wouldn't wish it on anybody.
Also, and Carmack nails it, people are different. You might think it's unhealthy, or unnatural, but some people are obsessive, perfectionist, focused or just really passionate about something. Also, some people are just better organized. Again, Carmack's right, you probably can't be at your peak for extended periods of time, but there's plenty of things you can get done that don't require your peak.
When this issue is raised from concern of people being taken advantage of, fine, I agree. But just because some people can't do it, doesn't mean no one can (just look at the extreme range of physical and creative abilities that people have). And, like all other life style choices, what's the point of judging other people?
Keep in mind that I'm the sort of person you are indicating already. I sleep little and don't care much about work/life balance. When I've worked on teams that are burning the candle at both ends, I am able to hold out longer than others and usually end up carrying things over the finish line.
That's the point of my comment: Even for those who ought to thrive, things start to break down, and no amount of energy or toughness changes that. We are human. I want to warn/remind other engineers that these practices are unsustainable. Hell, I want to remind myself of that after repeating this work to the bone/burnout cycle so many times.
When you are in a startup that has found a market, and all you have to do is ship the next MVP and you can start printing money, you're pretty motivated to work weekends to make that happen faster, even if it's a bad idea.
I would guess that these successful startups could stop working weekends, change their culture to focus on measuring value and deliverables, and still be successful.
That's good weekend work; they happened because of success so they don't have the same mental load and they tend to be sporadic so you get recovery time.
Bad weekend work is caused by relentless internal pressure. That's counter-productive.
They are there for 3 reasons.
1) They are passionate about their product. 2) They have an 'oh shit' deadline due soon. 3) They had nothing else better to do and enjoy their coworkers.
I've been in the all 3 situations before. To believe being there on a weekend for one reason, and one reason only, shows her myopia. If her indicator of success is the # of hours you put in, it explains why her turnaround failed...
Now, if everyone would make ideal strategic choices and the whole thing would be a zero-sum game, then I'd agree with you, the ones that put in more time would reap more benefit. But looking around me (admittedly, far away from SV, in a backwater Eastern European country), that doesn't look to be the case.
Quick count, how many of you (us) are reading HN and counting that in work time?
What really creates value is smart, prophetic strategy and effective management. Hours are a resource guided by strategy and management, not an end in themselves.
If your strategy is clueless and your management is intrusive, all you're doing is wasting everyone's time - and 80 hour weeks won't help you.
I do agree that you can't code for 80 hours straight for weeks on end, but "80 hours of work" isn't necessarily that. I also agree that it's still stressful even so, and I wouldn't recommend living that way for years on end, but younger folk can afford it for a while.
In other words, success for one startup doesn't mean success for another (let alone personal success). Working weekends doesn't mean you'll succeed, and vice versa. And working crazy hours doesn't mean that's why you succeeded.
> Do people still think you can get away with 40-50 hours when the next guy is just as good as you and putting in 80?
The 80-hour guy's personal ROI is half that of the 40-hour guy. Meaning the return has to be twice as good to justify his additional time investment. This is great for the company, but terrible for the individual.
In a startup, your competitive advantage is rarely going to be how many hours you work - how can it be, when you're playing against large well-capitalized companies that can assign entire teams at the drop of a hat and thereby outwork you tenfold? Rather, you rely on some combination of:
- underdoing the competition (you can't do everything as 1-10 people, so you have to fail and iterate quickly with minimal effort and learn as much as you can from each iteration); - personal / professional connections (OK, so you can spend more time here, but it's often not going to be behind a computer or at the office, and it will be very hard to measure productivity-wise); - blind luck (which isn't in your control anyways, so don't waste your time trying); - the innovator's dilemma (which isn't really in your control either, but gives you a several-year headstart while larger companies slowly figure out that your market is lucrative enough for them to bother with).
Finally: from personal experience, the productivity gains of working 80 hour weeks are illusory. I make more mistakes, incur more technical debt, work on fewer of the right problems and more of the wrong ones, take on stress that impacts my decision-making and communication skills...
[1] http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2014/12/working-... [2] https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs181/projects/crunc... [3] http://ftp.iza.org/dp8129.pdf
Dieing of a stress-induced heart attack at 35 isn't winning at life.
"What’s the worst advice you ever got? Listen to what your boss tells you. My boss never liked the idea of Spider-Man. He didn’t want to do it. I had to sneak Spider-Man into another book, over my boss’s head. Experts really know nothing."
Interesting quote from the boss that banned working from home!
http://www.businessinsider.com/marissa-mayer-who-just-banned...
It should have been a policy to do it for everyone...
There is no actual conflict in her statements unless a mother both needs to work and needs to stay at home, and consider that to be possible.
Banning it is contrary to the ideals she sets out above.
Cutting off the ability to work remotely, which is how most people who cannot afford child care manage small children, sends the message that she is uniquely allowed to work and be a mom, while everyone else can pound sand.
I haven't seen anyone who can look after a small child and work at the same time. Either you're working or looking after the child.
On the other hand if your argument is that Yahoo should have offered discounted childcare on onsite that Marissa received, then your argument makes perfect sense.
I haven't seen anyone who can look after a small child and work at the same time. Either you're working or looking after the child.
On the other hand if your argument is that Yahoo should have offered discounted childcare on onsite that Marissa received, then your argument makes perfect sense.
Start ups fail for all kinds of reasons, sure sometimes it's because people didn't work hard enough. But not remotely always. Sometimes an idea just doesn't pan out. Sometimes people get screwed by a bad choice, sometimes that bad choice was made because they were working so hard they weren't thinking straight.
Any kind of statement like saying that you can tell which start ups will succeed or fail based on a single criteria is just hubris and obviously wrong.
I'm sure she has a whole staff of weekend workers that spend quite a lot of time making sure you know just how much they're working.
Meanwhile Yahoo's office are still empty from people that work from home and most people on cruise control. I've never met a workaholic from Yahoo. Any person worth their salt was gone long ago. The rest are there because why quit a plum cruise control gig.
_____
As someone who just created the general outline of a five-year plan (my first one), I'm wondering what other HNers have to say about the subject.
That is, you need to do the planning to look around and see e.g. what your strengths/weaknesses/opportunities/threats are, what your objectives are, and what direction to set out in. Otherwise you run the risk of paralysis or being permanently behind events.
On the other hand, reality deviates from the plan immediately, for better or for worse. But at least you have the information gathered from the planning phase to re-plan from.
A plan isn't a bad thing but being overly committed to it can be fatal. One of the things about publishing a five year plan for a company is that you are usually judged in the markets by how closely you stuck to and succeeded in that plan. In tech, and probably most other industries as well, that can be fatal. Publishing a goal is a little less fatal since it doesn't outline a series of steps toward reaching that goal and allows you flexibility to pivot. Assuming of course that you didn't phrase your goal in the form of a plan or get too specific or detailed.
When I look back to 2011 I'd never have guessed that I would be where I am, doing what I do, today. I'm confident I'll be able to say the same in 2021.
My parents grew up with the "one-company-for-life" mentality, but I'm a firm believer that it's good to mix things up every few years to keep yourself fresh and motivated. That's not to say you should abandon something that you're truly passionate about if you continue to derive long-term enjoyment from it, but rather be open and flexible to new opportunities as they may take you places you'd never imagine.
That similar trend has shown up in my personal life too, although not as often.
A general outline is useful to have. A useful four-year plan is kind of like "graduate from college". Lots of room for improvisation along the way, but the ability to measure if life is headed in the direction you want to be headed.
In practice, I've found it impossible to follow a plan beyond two years due to external factors (friends and co-workers move, industries change, laws change, deaths, etc.). Those external factors seem to speed up with age. However, having a "general outline" (like waypoints on a journey) helps to correct course or select an alternate path when those inevitable changes happen.
> When reporters write about Google, they write about it as if it was inevitable. The actual experience was more like, “Could you work 130 hours in a week?” The answer is yes, if you’re strategic about when you sleep, when you shower, and how often you go to the bathroom
This is fine in spurts but doing it on a sustained basis is actually suboptimal. Crunch time for extended periods is bad for problem-solving and for productivity. There are critical periods where it can be productive... when the team is all obsessed in tackling a crisis or timely opportunity. But sustaining this for more than several weeks a year at most in total is actually detrimental.
> I can tell you which startups will succeed, without even knowing what they do. Being there on the weekend is a huge indicator of success
No. This is not true. At best, this is a gross oversimplification.
And it's disheartening to see Mayer hammering this single point over and over. It almost seems like a point of pride for her... which leads to:
> There was a moment when someone said to me, “Wow, you might be the busiest person on the planet.” In the Midwest, where I grew up, you shrug off a compliment like that and think a lot of people in the world are really busy, like President Obama. And then President Obama started posting YouTube videos for fun.
Alright, douchey-ness of this humble brag (let alone humble-brag in even glancing comparing yourself to the POTUS) aside, this underscores again the obsession with hours worked. I just vehemently disagree with this. Valuable output and quality matter most, not hours worked. It's highly questionable to claim that more hours worked leads to greater overall value of output. Beyond some threshold (which I believe varies person by person), there is an asymptotic incremental contribution to total valuable output. And at some point, total value of output declines, where the incremental contribution of more time worked in a given period is negative.
This is an unhealthy and unhelpful view.
Moving onto totally different topics...
> > Does it bother you that your parenting choices were criticized?
> In my view, there’s just entirely too much judgment over motherhood...
Here, here! Totally agree.
> I would never have a five-year plan. If I’d stuck to my original five-year plan when I was 18, I would have missed every great thing that ever happened to me.
Agree very much again. I think you can have high-level achievement goals, but not a specific destination or path laid out for getting there. Having fungible plans is usually wisest because every day you have more information than you did before and every day you have a chance of encountering a previously unknown opportunity. Need to be open to leveraging that information and those opportunities when it's called for, as opposed to sticking to a rigid plan.
> We had shareholders with two different priorities. We have some people who owned Yahoo stock because they really cared about digital advertising and the internet and a possible turnaround there. And we had another set of stakeholders who owned it because they saw a lot of positive transactions that could happen with these very large, lucrative Asian assets. And we had duties to both as the executive team of the company.
That is totally fair. I think Mayer's biggest failing was not recognizing this early enough and not being proactive enough about resolving it. It was a disaster waiting to happen. She and the company seemed very focused on the turnaround early on, and overly committed to holding the assets together. Recognizing from the get go that Yahoo had different shareholder groups -- and in particular that Yahoo was or easily could become the target of activist investors -- it is surprising that this wasn't addressed boldly, head-on, quickly.
It seem...
to me Mayer is saying Yahoo did not get over the hump cause they dont have enough determination, while failed to acknowledge that she drove them the wrong direction past few years.
Really? I always thought that pulling all-nighters hurts more than it helps. Optimizing your bathroom breaks seems really silly to me.
Mayer is someone who proclaims to believe in the power of data. I'm curious then what data she has to back her views on crunch==maximization of value creation. Most of the data I've seen says the opposite. It seems Mayer may be letting her anecdotal experience in the early days of Google trump data here. (A it's also possible that anyone, including Mayer, can have misperceived or misattributed the importance of sustained crunch in those days or its causative effect on success.)
Managers who were acutely aware of how little they understood about what went on underneath them tended to be the ones who spent the most time in the office and who cared most about what time people came/left.
They also tend to be the ones who are the most against remote working.
Competent people don't require those metrics.
But life is unfair, and there probably are some people legitimately can put in 130 hours of net-positive work for extended periods of time. And presumably, these people will be disproportionately represented among the "successful".
Another issue is it seems like it'd be hard to tell while you're pulling those ridiculous hours whether or not you're part of the "lucky" subset that actually continues to be productive.
The hours she is working immediately says to me that she is not capable of hiring good people and delegating responsibilities. Now, I don't expect a CEO of a large company to work a 40 hour work week, but 130 hours is ridiculous. Out of that 130 hours of work, none of that could have been delegated? Is she really that special that only she can handle it?
Which sounds out of place in the context of the other advice <sic> provided - such as 'work Saturdays to guarantee success', 'make a choice and stick to it and make it great', 'it's safer to keep working than walk to your car', and the Alibaba question dodge.
Clearly we live in different worlds.
You could add to that "and care not a jot about the quality of the decisions you're making."
My husband [the venture capital investor Zachary Bogue] runs a co-working office in San Francisco. He runs his company out of there and other startups cycle through. And if you go in on a Saturday afternoon, I can tell you which startups will succeed, without even knowing what they do. Being there on the weekend is a huge indicator of success, mostly because these companies just don’t happen. They happen because of really hard work.
This was actually the part I found most surprising and interesting. One the one hand, it's scary that you have to put in insanely long hours like that to succeed. But on the other hand, it's liberating knowing that one of the keys to success, is something everyone has access to.
If some random person had made the above comments, I would have laughed them off as an insane workaholic. But knowing that this advice is coming from someone's who's seen it first hand at early-stage-Google, and many other startups... it's hard to ignore it, no matter how much I may want to.
Also, people tend to think they work harder than they actually do. I'm sure they worked hard, but there's almost no chance they were working 130 hour weeks, certainly not consistently. There are only 168 hours in a week. I also don't believe the one all-nighter a week line. Working like this would completely destroy your productivity.
There seems to be a lot of "showing off" of and around your work.
I know of early days operational people (SREs were not a thing yet) need to stay in campus to resolve production issues. They need to stay all-night or come to office in midnight regularly every week.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
not to mention all the people who worked even harder, and failed anyway. or worse.
i think when you make your money $100M at a time, you just tend to think you're right about everything. can't say i blame her, i probably would too.
maybe i should look into marrying a VC also.
Nobody's ever failed because they pee too often.
In the 19th century, when organized labor first compelled factory owners to limit workdays to 10 (and then eight) hours, management was surprised to discover that output actually increased – and that expensive mistakes and accidents decreased. This is an experiment that Harvard Business School’s Leslie Perlow and Jessica Porter repeated over a century later with knowledge workers. It still held true. Predictable, required time off (like nights and weekends) actually made teams of consultants more productive. [1]
[0] http://www.salon.com/2012/03/14/bring_back_the_40_hour_work_...
[1] https://hbr.org/2015/08/the-research-is-clear-long-hours-bac...
But I don't think this is true for the small minority of people who are so passionate about the project, that they are intrinsically motivated to put in insanely long hours. I've experienced such intrinsic motivation during various parts of my own life, and the resulting 80 hour work-weeks that I imposed on myself didn't feel like a productivity drain at all. I think this is what Marissa Meyer and other startup founders are referring to, when they talk about the insanely long hours they worked during the early stages of their company.
It would be really interesting to study this specifically among start-ups, academics, or game developers where some people put in very long hours.
But maybe this is just one of those legendary questions people ask to weed out those who would immediately balk because they want to have a life outside of work.
Seems like she a walking business cliche. Can anyone counter this with evidence of her creativity?
I have nothing against Marissa Mayer and some respects really appreciate having a prominent female CEO but did anyone else find that shocking that she would say that? I mean she is a CEO. Wouldn't she want to avoid talking about US political figures. Also I'm not really sure if it is a dig or a compliment. It could be a compliment. Lots of busy people can have the facade of looking like they have relaxing lives which takes even more work.
There is also an intensity factor of work. Some work is insanely intense both physically and mentally and you just can't do 130 hours. I did consulting for 40 hours a month for a brief period. Those 40 hours felt like 40 hours a week. Meanwhile I worked on my own startup and early in its fledgling years my wife complained about how many hours I worked (she claims more than 90 hours) but to me it felt like 40 hour work week.
I bet if you tell me only these three things, I'll have a more accurate prediction of which startups will succeed:
* Founder's parents' income
* Founder's parents' education level
* Number of people with over $1M liquid assets that founder knows or has "social access" to
I really need to get myself a mentor like Marissa Mayer so I can learn about work ethics.
She gets away with it because she's a woman. Any other man would have been steamrolled into oblivion by now.
If she thinks the odds are tough in her husband's incubator, wait till she sees how tough it is OUTSIDE of it. I mean it's tough for me not living in SF but I imagine it would be even tougher in places like China - People there probably drive themselves to insanity in the pursuit of success.
If she divorced her husband, the whole incubator (and all startups within) would probably go bankrupt within one year.
I find this to be one of the biggest indicators. I have friends whose parents are extremely wealthy and they tried all sorts of random careers before finally settling on something. For them there was zero real risk since they always had their parents to fall back on. One's dad even told him to come up with a business idea and he would fund it and help him make it happen. Instead he goofed around for awhile, before simply going back to school.
Personally, I'm more irked at potential wasted than jealous. I have no one to fall back on, and that has made me fiercely independent, but also very risk conscious. The good thing is that it is easier than every to bootstrap ideas with minimal time.
I suspect that lowering the risk of entrepreneurship could unlock enormous innovation potential for society.
When Silicon Valley talks about "diversity" it is often ethnicity or gender, but diversity of economic background is also important.
Anyone want to take that bet?
Actually stay? I have trouble seeing it. Only if she's got some guaranteed line of sight on the VZW ceo gig, but Armstrong and many others will contend there.