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Ask YC: What kind of hours do all of you hackers work?

42 points by whalesalad ↗ HN
I'm curious to know because I work in Honolulu for a new startup, and there aren't many of us down here. I actually "technically" work for two startups, so that makes it even harder because both of them need 110% percent of me and at this stage in the game its not possible to leave either of them (despite how, in any other circumstance, it would be better for both parties to give up on one)

Anyways, here's what my sleep schedule looks like.

Usually the weekends get my pretty screwed up, because I will be awake until the sun comes out. It's not the smartest idea because I'm actually not that efficient if my sleep schedule is constantly changing, but like I mentioned earlier, two projects means balls to the wall all the time and im having a hard time getting a grip on everything.

I tend to sleep for a while, generally forcing myself to get out of bed after 6 hours or so, then its back at it. During the work week (my real "job", the startup here in Hawaii) I tend to get in around noon every day or later, and then work as late as I can before heading home to work on the other project. Most of the people in this environment are 9-5'ers (or even worse, in Hawaii the city is alive and full speed ahead by 6am every day, and shuts down at 4).

What do you guys do up in the Silicon Valley? Are you more of the type that just work as long as you can, sleep for any amount of time, and get back at it? Do you try and keep a regimented schedule? I'm anxious to hear about all of this because sleep and time and all that is related is really the story of my life right now. hah.

51 comments

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rms
>I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me. -Hunter S. Thompson
keizo
what's your startup in town? I'm in Kailua doing a not at all related to programming or hacking startup.
swombat
I started up two companies while still working a full-time job. Good luck, I know it's not easy, by far.

You gotta do what works for you and gives you enough time. I think a good approach is to figure out which part of the day is your most "high quality time", and be sure to work on your highest priority in that time.

For me, I found that morning was my quality time. After a whole day of working, I just didn't have the energy to do stuff anymore. Since I had a strict 9-6 job in a bank/consulting firm, I had to put my quality time before that.

So, for 6 months or so, I woke up at about 4am every morning, then worked for 3 hours, then had a 1-hour nap, then went to work. I'd go to bed before 10pm (else I couldn't work the next day). Sometimes I had evening meetings for my second startup, just to keep things even busier.

The most important thing, I found, was actually to get the support of your friends/partner/etc. My girlfriend was really understanding and cooked dinner for me every evening (even though she hates cooking) and that probably saved me a precious 45 minutes every day. Makes a lot of difference when you're really overloaded.

Anyway, so, simple method: - prioritise your startups - allocate the quality time each day to your number 1 priority - make sure your friends/family/partner support you 100%

Oh, re: constant/changing schedule, I kept a mostly constant sleep schedule, because otherwise I couldn't cope. So I woke up at 4am every day during the week - gave myself an extra 2 hours of sleep on the weekend by waking up at 6. Went to bed at 10 pretty much every night though, week and weekend.

PS: I should add I also took some Modafinil in the morning, that helped wake me up while still allowing a morning nap.

ScottWhigham
I'm in Dallas but I thought this was an interesting question and I want to take part :)

I'm an early-morning riser. I have two kids[0,4] and a loving wife. I like to be finished with work no later than 6:00PM and usually closer to 5:30. I still have to work 12-14 hour days so I wake up at 3:00AM two days, sleep as late as I can on the third day. I do that pretty religiously although some weeks it's a 4:00AM wake up (or not at all). Sometimes I get burned out after a few months and then I'll just sleep until I wake up for a week of so.

aggieben
Whatcha workin' on? I'm near Dallas too, always on the lookout for other geeks.

/me has wife and kids too

lux
I tend to cycle through different patterns, often depending on workload, season changes, etc. I'm currently up pretty much all night and sleeping in until noonish, and since I set my own hours I often just get done communication stuff during the day then work on programming at night, with some socializing in between :)

It can be challenging though, since staying up late can create a tendency to overwork, and often in a fairly unproductive way. I try to keep semi-balanced with a less-is-more approach. You don't need or want to code 12 hours a day. If I can do 6 hours I've had a really good day. If I get at least one good bit of work done, even if it took an hour to do, I'm happy with that. And that seems to be a realistic pace compared to other programmers anyway, in my experience at least. Not to say others are slow, I just mean that throwing more hours at a problem is often a lot like throwing more programmers on a project: there's a decrease in efficiency with each one added.

fendale
I struggle to see how anyone can be productive at all working all your waking hours. The only result of that is going to be burnout or stress related illness.

I don't have or work for a startup granted, but when I am working on something hard, I reckon I have 5 - 7 hours a day in me and then I am just wasting time - it was the same studying for exams and my degree - I have never pulled an all nighter for an exam, but still managed to get the top grade - proper rest and relaxation are just as important as the working time - properly rested you will get far more done in less time too!

Oh and leave some time for exercise - that helps you productivity, stress and well being no-end!

metatronscube
I completely agree, I'm only really productive for 4-5hr during the day (this is when I come up with my best ideas, work or solutions) the rest of the day is spent doing general admin stuff. If you push yourself too hard you are likely just to burn yourself out. Working too long and hard is generally counter productive (at least thats how I feel)
swombat
See my other post on this question.. it's possible to last quite a while.

But yeah, at that rate, burnout is inevitable. However, with some animalistic (see http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html ) determination and focus, and the right support network (friends, family, partner), it's possible to last quite a while, even though bits and pieces of your life are falling apart along the way.

I should add to the post I made (but can't anymore now) that after I launched that first startup, I went pretty much into super-low productivity mode for about 2 months, which was absolutely necessary to recover from over 8 months of working two and a half intellectually demanding jobs!

thorax
Work doesn't necessarily need to be stressful. If you're doing the right stuff, it's fun enough that you want to keep at it and you're productive in different ways throughout the day.

It's rare when I feel like I'm "working all [my] waking hours" because when I feel mentally drained on the boring things, I find some of the fun things in our backlog and toy with those-- e.g. designing a prototype for our next site, doing some graphic design (which I find fun but I'm not so good at), trying a new technology/tool that might help us out, etc.

I enjoy hacking very much. Startup founders often get caught up working on all sorts of unfun business things during their core hours so designing/coding then becomes your relaxation time.

The biggest problem is that exercise stuff-- I'm going to go work on that right now.

babul
Depends on if you really enjoy what you are doing and find it stimulating enough. Being able to take a power nap at times also helps.

I used to work 12-14hrs/day and be highly productive (80/20 rule) as once tasks got boring or my mind started to wonder I would nap for half hour before doing a completly different task e..g. from coding to creating designs in photoshop, which was different enough to use different parts of my mind and thought processes. A change is as good as a holiday.

Most projects were completed as quickly as I could do and because they did not drag-on and because I was able to make lots of headway (reward in itself) I could sustain this for several weeks at a time.

Afterwards I would always take a some time off though :)

fendale
Yea if you are interested enough in what you are doing, or its your own startup things are a little different - even interesting work tires you out eventually though.

I need at least 1 day a week off all the same - I think that is important. Work real hard Monday - Friday and then party at the weekend :)

wallflower
DHH, the creator of Ruby on Rails, recently talked about getting more sleep. Too much emphasis, he said, is put on the superman mystique of the coder who codes 12 hours/day. We should stop bragging about how little sleep we get and instead wake up rested and productive.

"projects are not dependent on what happens in one day"

As a personal note, from experiencing this many times... once you get sick (which can be accelerated by lack of sleep + diet + stress), the wheels fall off everything (startup/coding? try getting out of bed)

Tamerlin
In the 12 years that I've largely wasted as a professional software engineer, what I've noticed is that the best developers never work a lot of overtime for extended periods of time. Sure, it happens that they end up staying late to get something done now and then, but it's very rare.

The bad ones make up for taking the "shut up and code" methodology and spending hours and hours trying to get their pointlessly complicated solutions to work, rather than trying to do it right in the first place. The results, assuming they work, are almost invariably a morass of undocumented spaghetti code. It makes you wonder; what were they doing with all that time? If they weren't documenting their code, then the options are: a) they were faking it b) hunting for code that solves their problem on the internet to hide the fact that they couldn't write it themselvse c) wasting time debugging their own mess because they couldn't remember what the code they wrote last night at 11pm was supposed to do, but they were too tired and rushed to bother with little things like documentation

The let's work a 12+ hour day approach isn't how you get the job done, it's how you achieve job security when you work for a big company.

fendale
Yea, in the big companies, you would not believe how often I have seen someone 'recognised' and given great praise for being in the office real late pulling a release out of the fire - almost everytime it was that very person that put it into the fire to begin with - The ones that just got the thing to work and went home didn't even feature on the radar!

Sometimes I think the way to progress in a big company is to make a hash of things and then stay late fixing them - that doesn't compute with me though - they are bound to get found out at some point, right?

Tamerlin
Sort of. Those are the ones that tend to get promoted to management roles and proceed to use the same reward system for the people who come after them.

In the end, you end up with a culture of long work hours because "that's how it's done" rather than for any rational reason.

mrtron
I can manage that schedule for a few months, but after that I need to shutdown for a week or I start to go crazy.
edw519
I am running a marathon, not a sprint, so I frame my long working hours within a "healthy schedule". My typical day:

  7:00 am - immediately start coding last night's plan, then email, headlines, HN
  8 to 9 - exercise
  9 - breakfast & internet
  9:30 to 12 - code
  12 - lunch & internet
  12:30 to 6 - code
  6 - dinner with family (home or restaurant)
  7 to 9 - code
  9 to 11 - computer off, pencil/paper, analysis, design, detail plan for tomorrow
Exceptions: one to two days per week consulting (still keep my night schedule), one day per week with family, occasional sports on TV. I could keep this up forever.
swombat
Sounds like a very good day plan. How well does it adapt to life's niggles? Meetings with business partners, dates, friends, etc? (particularly other people who also have busy schedules)
edw519
I like to push all that into my one or two days away from my terminal if I can. That's what those days are for.
mrtron
That seems like a very sustainable schedule, and similar to mine. I wake up about an hour later (go to bed an hour or two later), exercise just before dinner, and do my planning in the morning. Other than that it lines up pretty much the same.
edw519
Cool. I found if I didn't exercise early, I didn't at all. I also sleep with the curtains open, so I wake up at sunrise. Nice to see I'm not the only one who needs all-nighters to get anything done. Thanks, mrtron.
ph0rque
Somewhat off-topic, but is there any chance we'll get to see the results of your work in an alpha/beta version soon?
tx
How can you cram your programming (i.e. creation process) into pre-defined hours every day? It's like saying "I am funny from 8 to 12, then I get creative from 1pm to 5pm and I get 'Eureka' moment usually around 7pm"

I am honestly jealous. I have days when I just throw away weeks of work and redo everything in a couple of hours, or days when nothing gets done simply because I am stuck. Your description of coding sounds more like you're in construction/manufacturing business.

edw519
"Your description of coding sounds more like you're in construction/manufacturing business."

Exactly. That's how I do it.

It wasn't always like this. It took lots of trial and error to figure this out. The secret was to decouple creative time and terminal time. When I'm at the terminal during the day, I usually have a backlog of straight forward work to do. Sure there are decisions to be made and some creativity, but the bulk of the real thinking was already done, usually the night before.

The decoupling has been the key for me.

Need to think? Get pencil, paper, listings, and GO TO EZCHAIR (or library or Borders).

Need to accomplish? Have detailed plans and GO TO TERMINAL. Not as much "head in the clouds" permitted there.

I talked more about this here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=191275

webwright
If you manage 10 hours a day coding and less than 1h day on email PLUS blogs/news, you are a pretty unique animal. We had a RescueTime group of YC Founders running during the Winter08 session, and I don't think anyone in the group EVER hit 10 hours of coding in a single day. Much less sustained it.

I'm also suspicious of the <1hr I see alotted for email and news (all while getting 7000+ karma here?!). If that's the case, you are fabulously unique (I'm saying this with a database of data with millions of man hours of attention data-- lots of them from web developers).

Of course, maybe you mean what most people mean when they say "I'm coding", which is a distracted mishmash of IM, news, and email, with a light sprinkling of actual coding in there.

I hereby challenge you to use RescueTime for 1 week and then take a screenshot of your dashboard. :-)

edw519
"I hereby challenge you to use RescueTime"

No need. You're right.

I should amend my previous schedule to say "at terminal" instead of "coding". In addition to my dedicated meal breaks, I alt-tab to the internet several times throughout the day. But it's not as bad as it seems...

I go to about a dozen websites including email and hacker news. Of those dozen websites, I spend 90% of the time here. As I have mentioned before, hacker news is my social life when I'm working. I work alone, all day long, most days, so I come here for my breaks. My karma total is a result of my participation here, which is a perfect counterbalance to my coding (sometimes you just gotta pull your head out).

I never IM or answer the phone without checking caller id; everyone knows I prefer email.

I suppose RescueTime would confirm what I think I already know. Maybe I'm afraid to find out.

webwright
Never IM'ing is gold. My favorite stat is that the average RT user alt-tabs to an IM window 77 times PER DAY. Think what that does to people's flow!

Kudos on the focus. If you ever do try an experimental run with RT, I'd love to hear about it. I can ALMOST promise that you'll be surprised by your data. :-)

edw519
2 years ago, I had a client that required me to be available by IM between 8 and 5. I was actually stunned after watching their employees IMing all day long. It was one of the best examples of work prevention I'd ever seen. I told them I could IM or I could work, but not both. Needless to say, they didn't last long.

You have me 95% convinced to try the One Week RescueTime trial. Maybe next week...

kirubakaran
> We had a RescueTime group of YC Founders running during the Winter08 session, and I don't think anyone in the group EVER hit 10 hours of coding in a single day. Much less sustained it.

Can you please share what the maximum, median etc for this group was? I want to see where I stand.

nostrademons
I'll share my data. My max was 6.5 hours of coding. Since January, I've had 7 days where I spent more than 5 hours coding. My average (as given by the trendline) is about 3 hours/day.

Coding is my top (computer) activity on average. I spend about 45 minutes each on Reddit and news.YC; there's also a big long tail of time spent on untagged apps (often only 20 minutes or so each over the past half-year, but the total is nearly as much as Reddit + news.YC).

kirubakaran
You are my A-List hacker :-p So, extra thanks for the data.
webwright
It was a small enough group that I won't share data, but I'll tell you mine (which is pretty similar to my co-founders, except Joe, who is an ANIMAL of productivity).

I have a "webdev" tag (which includes design and coding) that peaked at 7 hours, but typically is 3-4.5.

I have a "work" tag (which includes all webdev stuff AND work email-- customer support and fundraising mostly), which peaked at 10h 40m, but typically was more like 5-7.

About 10% of my time is untagged, which is probably split between 1-visit goofy sites and obscure CSS documentation, so you can round up the above numbers a touch.

Oh, and 27% of my time is spent on SOME Google App (gmail for domains, search, analytics, docs, reader). Google owns my ass. :-)

kirubakaran
Thats very helpful. Thanks a lot Tony. (off topic: pic with pipe was way better than what you have now)
elai
This is beauty of the 9 to 5:

* 7am: Wake up, read HN, eat/get dressed/etc * 8:20am: get on bicycle, bike to work (30min exercise) * 8:50am: get clean * 9am: work (code for 90% of the time) * 4:50pm: stop work * 5:00pm: bicycle back home (30min exercise) * 5:30pm: clean up * 6pm: eat

And after dinner I have free time, I could easily add 2 or 3 more hours of working if I wanted to here. And I'm socially synchronized with the rest of the world!

tadej
I'm working my full-time job and in my startup (along with a couple of personal projects) - and I was close to burn-out several times during the past couple of months.

I always have a flexible work schedule, but I usually start around 8-10 am and stop at around 8-10 pm :).

LOTS OF EXERCISE (jogging in the nearby woods)

And I'm definitely working on getting closer to 8-10 hrs per day ...

truebosko
Get sleep and stay healthy because that way you'll be the most productive

Some days I'll code away from 9-7pm, some from 10am-12pm because I'm just too tired.

Have a life, get sleep, and balance it all out. Think of how much you'll get done sooner if you aren't re-typing half your shit for stupid bugs you made on that 3am binge

colinplamondon
Most days I wake up around 6am and go for a couple of dives, as I'm working on my Divemaster certification in the mornings. Great deal, if anyone's interested- you pay $700 for the course and get unlimited dives for as long as you're working on your certification, which can be dragged out to four months of diving every day. Plus, it's on a Thai island (Koh Tao), so cost of living is quite cheap. $200/month for a bungalow, and $1.50 for some incredible phad thai.

Get back around noon from diving, get some lunch, work until 2-3am. Likely too much, but in the early startup phase of doing a startup there's simply a lot of work to do.

As an aside, I don't really understand the whole weekend thing, if it's necessary to take a break from your day to day life then there's probably something wrong with your day to day life.

jnil
I have to disagree, because if you don't allow yourself a break than you end up wearing yourself out, which, in the end, sucks. On weekends I would say you should at least take 1 of the days off to relax. It will really help you during the week to peak on performance.
colinplamondon
You might have missed the "going diving in a tropical paradise every morning" part of my post :)
daveungerer
I'm actually interested in spending a few months in Thailand. Quit my job a few weeks ago so I'm going to be relaxing at first, then work on the first project I have planned while continuing to travel.

How's the internet access where you are? Do you ever do anything else than diving for fun? Found Ko Tao on Wikipedia and it sounds great, but I'd like to see other parts of Thailand too. Have you been around?

My e-mail is in my profile if you prefer that.

colinplamondon
Someone else emailed me asking as well, I'm thinking I'll have to write a blog article on heading out here...

But yeah! Email sent. Short answer for those interested:

Internet access is... acceptable. I brought an Airport Express and upon arriving at the scuba resort here I just asked them if I could plug it in. They'd been hoping to setup wireless for a while but hadn't had a router, so they were fine with it. Voila, wireless. Problem being, it's usually 5-20kb/s, with my co-founder getting up to 200kb/s. I think it's because he has Wireless N to my Wireless B/G. Should have upgraded to a newer laptop before leaving, but live and learn.

Sure, hanging out and talking with friends at one of the beachside bars, going driving around the island and exploring, or reading/writing. I'm pretty easy to please when it comes to having fun, just give me a great conversation in a cool locale, whether that be a SF coffee shop, a BA tango club, or a Koh Tao beach, and I'm good to go.

Haven't been around, as of yet. Upon getting into Bangkok's airport I booked a domestic flight on over to Koh Samui and got there three hours after arriving in Bangkok. Koh Samui was a lot more touristy than Koh Tao, and in general just seemed to be developed too quickly. When I first got there I was amazed (beach! warm weather! jungle!), but in retrospect I prefer Koh Tao by leaps and bounds.

If anyone else has any questions, I'm not great about checking Hacker News comments, so feel free to hit me up by email as well, it's in my profile.

Harkins
I work 11 AM to 11:30 if the projects are uninteresting. I work 7 AM around the clock to 2 PM if the project is good.
orlick
I've been keeping pretty close tabs on my hours for the past few months and find that I generally average about 6 hours of really focused and productive work per day. It's really hard for me to get into the productive zone so I might actually be sitting at the computer for 10 hours procrastinating.
LogicHoleFlaw
I find that I am much more productive when I go do something else when I find myself wasting time on the PC. I'll come back refreshed and ready to go.

"butt-time" is the bane of my existence.

yaj
My schedule have this priority: day job - startup - sleep - fun.(besides programming)

Day job - 8 hours on weekday

Startup - 3 hours on weekday, 6 hours on weekend (minimum)

Sleep - 6 hours

Fun - unrestricted as long as I get my minimum hours for startup and sleep

Prioritizing works better for me rather than a schedule. I usually work on the startup longer but if anyone invites me to hangout No problem as long as I get my minimum hours.

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