Stress (and honestly, a little insanity) from constant 80 hour weeks of coding lead to me splitting with what felt like the love of my life (at the time) and also lead to me leaving my first job (lost my cool with execs a few times), which paid very well and I had a few devs reporting to me, 2 years out of school.
I really love working 80+ hours, I love hacking shit together as much as the next person here, and I'd like my own company someday so I will likely be working those hours again.
However, I am aware of the damage it will cause to any balance existing in my life and that's a decision I (and anybody else who does so) have (has) to make.
The Winter Olympics are starting in a week. Pay attention to the interviews with the athletes and the behind the scenes footage. These are some of the best athletes in the world, and they spend a great deal of their time doing exercises that barely look like the sport they compete in.
If you want to be great at something, you have to work very hard but some of that work has to be doing something else.
Take ten or twenty or thirty of those hours and do something else. Write a video game, blog, learn linear algebra, maybe again. Get some cardio. Meet new people and learn how to talk to them. Read some philosophy and ethics.
+1 from "the rest of the us". The people that wear their long work week on their sleeve as a badge of honor are, at best, very naive, and at worst, self-destructive.
In reference to the movie "Election", don't be a Tracy Flick in the workplace.
Some of my most trying encounters have been dealing with prolific people with bad ideas or sketchy ethics. People who think writing a pile of the wrong code will make things better.
Running as fast as you can in the wrong direction helps nobody. It’s the difference between being efficient and being effective. You need to step back and think about what you’re doing frequently.
"self destructive" is not even the worst. The worst is when they harm the lives of people around them.
People who are behaving in unsustainable ways and have employees reporting to them tend to be pretty awful managers. I've worked in teams run by such managers - it's a shitshow. When employees are routinely crying in the bathroom because of a single person, it's certainly not just "self" destructive anymore.
I’m very well aware of all of that - I read math books in my spare time, had a very interesting social life when I had the time for it, and had a very beautiful and amazing woman in my life at the time.
I had a few months shipping a project where work alone, before studying in spare time, hit about 80. I was not at a great company but was bumped up very high compared to the rest of the new grads and put at the helm of an important project for the company... it was a great career opportunity and I had to get a lot done. Working 80 hours is a bragging right only for a fool. I would do it again in a heartbeat if I owned the company, had a big slice in it, or something like that. However, aside from all of that, looking at my thoughts and actions and all that- staring at a computer screen figuring out logical patterns for 16 hours/day in a cubicle without any meetings is kinda fun- but it’s its own certain kind of madness. Would not put myself into that exact situation again.
80 hours?! I can't believe anyone can work that much, to me 40 hours is the limit. I won't work one hour more than that if it isn't necessary.
If I would code for just 60 hours/week I would only last less than two weeks. My spine and back would probably give up on me before that. Other than that I would be the worst father, friend and husband ever since my brain would be totally messed up between working hours, and in the long run during them as well.
Not to mention my productivity would be dipping to like 30% after a week or so with that pace. Today I have 5-7 highly productive hours out of 8 working remote. Sometimes less, sometimes more. But if I lose my balance and start working an extra hour each day I usually start dipping in productivity and sleep as the days go by.
Yep. Turns out you can write better code faster when you aren't drooling on your keyboard or buzzed on fifteen espressos.
The problems come when people compare real engineering work with programming. I studied mechanical engineering. Real engineering is a very, very old art, and 99% of what you do is plugging numbers and adding margins, and physical constraints mostly dictate what you can do. Programming is mostly navigating blind in an infinite sea of possibility, and the only constraints are time and space. It's much more by-feel than real engineering, and I expect it to be that way for another half-millennium at least.
All that is to say, you can push a real engineer harder and get ok results still. A programmer will just die under the whip.
"Real engineering" also runs on a different (slower) cadence, in part due to the longer timescale between inception and realisation of ideas, and due to the costs involved in making physical things.
Wow I really think this is nonsense. I'm a mechanical design engineer. My job is most certainly not just calculating shit. There is a substantial amount of thinking about how to solve problems in a way similar to software engineers. I'm a hobbyist programmer and programming can sometimes be "plugging in" code to solve a problem they already know to solve.
Edit: I want to amend this to say it's not just mechanical design engineers that have to figure stuff out. The electrical, industrial, and all other engineers I have worked with have to be creative in some form. And that includes classical mechanical engineers. Calculating the stress on a part may require you to really think about what sort of assumptions you can make or bizarre scenarios it may run into before doing anything.
I've done both as well, and while engineering does require real and serious thought, the traditions, literature, and science behind what you're doing is a trillion miles ahead of where programming is.
To put it in perspective, programming has barely had its Archimedes and its Da Vinci by this point. Best practices are a joke, and are usually based around superstition, personality cults,
and faith instead of actual empiricism. Standardization is moving backwards, and computer 'scientists' rarely solve the problems software 'engineers' actually have.
It's a mess. Engineering can fall back on the basics, but programmers, at the end of the day, are mostly relying on instinct.
Edit: I'm not saying programmers are smarter or better. The opposite, in fact. The mistakes and oversights we get away with would likely get a real engineer arrested.
>To put it in perspective, programming has barely had its Archimedes and its Da Vinci by this point. Best practices are a joke, and are usually based around superstition, personality cults, and faith instead of actual empiricism. Standardization is moving backwards, and computer 'scientists' rarely solve the problems software 'engineers' actually have.
I think a lot of software engineering is quite hard to measure reliably. That's why you get all these cults. Software engineering to me is kind of like writing an essay. It's all about having a structure that other people can understand. But like essays, it's hard to put clarity of thought and readability into metrics.
Putting your essay into easily digestible paragraphs and chapters is like splitting up your program into functions and modules. One idea per paragraph is the same as a function doing what we can express in the function signature etc.
These are all tried and tested methods which have been working over millenia of writing and carry over in software as well.
One thing I realized when doing my own startup is how much of the startup and business advice you see on Twitter is purely personal marketing
Gary V is a good example. Hustling is his brand. When he tweets inspirational quotes or instagrams hustle mantras, he's just marketing himself.
A lot of times these "thought leaders" are pushing very unhealthy advice. They encourage people to set unrealistic goals for themselves and when they aren't reaching them, encourage pushing even harder.
An 80 hour work week is nothing to be proud about. Take care of yourself.
"We need to take a page from Sweden’s book and push for a 6 hour work day. None of this 14 hour, grind-until-you-die, chase-the-money, bootstrap-your-life, live-lean-and-stay-hungry crap."
Please. Feel free to spend your day however you like but don't presume to tell me how to spend my day.
I think this article is a victim of a title/content disconnect. Why editors insist on a 'catchier' title that undermines the content is beyond me. It's not like CLaG is fighting for ad revenue.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 48.0 ms ] threadI really love working 80+ hours, I love hacking shit together as much as the next person here, and I'd like my own company someday so I will likely be working those hours again.
However, I am aware of the damage it will cause to any balance existing in my life and that's a decision I (and anybody else who does so) have (has) to make.
The Winter Olympics are starting in a week. Pay attention to the interviews with the athletes and the behind the scenes footage. These are some of the best athletes in the world, and they spend a great deal of their time doing exercises that barely look like the sport they compete in.
If you want to be great at something, you have to work very hard but some of that work has to be doing something else.
Take ten or twenty or thirty of those hours and do something else. Write a video game, blog, learn linear algebra, maybe again. Get some cardio. Meet new people and learn how to talk to them. Read some philosophy and ethics.
Any and all of these will further your goal.
In reference to the movie "Election", don't be a Tracy Flick in the workplace.
Running as fast as you can in the wrong direction helps nobody. It’s the difference between being efficient and being effective. You need to step back and think about what you’re doing frequently.
People who are behaving in unsustainable ways and have employees reporting to them tend to be pretty awful managers. I've worked in teams run by such managers - it's a shitshow. When employees are routinely crying in the bathroom because of a single person, it's certainly not just "self" destructive anymore.
I had a few months shipping a project where work alone, before studying in spare time, hit about 80. I was not at a great company but was bumped up very high compared to the rest of the new grads and put at the helm of an important project for the company... it was a great career opportunity and I had to get a lot done. Working 80 hours is a bragging right only for a fool. I would do it again in a heartbeat if I owned the company, had a big slice in it, or something like that. However, aside from all of that, looking at my thoughts and actions and all that- staring at a computer screen figuring out logical patterns for 16 hours/day in a cubicle without any meetings is kinda fun- but it’s its own certain kind of madness. Would not put myself into that exact situation again.
If I would code for just 60 hours/week I would only last less than two weeks. My spine and back would probably give up on me before that. Other than that I would be the worst father, friend and husband ever since my brain would be totally messed up between working hours, and in the long run during them as well.
Not to mention my productivity would be dipping to like 30% after a week or so with that pace. Today I have 5-7 highly productive hours out of 8 working remote. Sometimes less, sometimes more. But if I lose my balance and start working an extra hour each day I usually start dipping in productivity and sleep as the days go by.
The problems come when people compare real engineering work with programming. I studied mechanical engineering. Real engineering is a very, very old art, and 99% of what you do is plugging numbers and adding margins, and physical constraints mostly dictate what you can do. Programming is mostly navigating blind in an infinite sea of possibility, and the only constraints are time and space. It's much more by-feel than real engineering, and I expect it to be that way for another half-millennium at least.
All that is to say, you can push a real engineer harder and get ok results still. A programmer will just die under the whip.
Edit: I want to amend this to say it's not just mechanical design engineers that have to figure stuff out. The electrical, industrial, and all other engineers I have worked with have to be creative in some form. And that includes classical mechanical engineers. Calculating the stress on a part may require you to really think about what sort of assumptions you can make or bizarre scenarios it may run into before doing anything.
To put it in perspective, programming has barely had its Archimedes and its Da Vinci by this point. Best practices are a joke, and are usually based around superstition, personality cults, and faith instead of actual empiricism. Standardization is moving backwards, and computer 'scientists' rarely solve the problems software 'engineers' actually have.
It's a mess. Engineering can fall back on the basics, but programmers, at the end of the day, are mostly relying on instinct.
Edit: I'm not saying programmers are smarter or better. The opposite, in fact. The mistakes and oversights we get away with would likely get a real engineer arrested.
I think a lot of software engineering is quite hard to measure reliably. That's why you get all these cults. Software engineering to me is kind of like writing an essay. It's all about having a structure that other people can understand. But like essays, it's hard to put clarity of thought and readability into metrics.
Putting your essay into easily digestible paragraphs and chapters is like splitting up your program into functions and modules. One idea per paragraph is the same as a function doing what we can express in the function signature etc.
These are all tried and tested methods which have been working over millenia of writing and carry over in software as well.
Gary V is a good example. Hustling is his brand. When he tweets inspirational quotes or instagrams hustle mantras, he's just marketing himself.
A lot of times these "thought leaders" are pushing very unhealthy advice. They encourage people to set unrealistic goals for themselves and when they aren't reaching them, encourage pushing even harder.
An 80 hour work week is nothing to be proud about. Take care of yourself.
Please. Feel free to spend your day however you like but don't presume to tell me how to spend my day.