60-80 Hours/Week

Is the CEO the CEO of a large startup or just a co-founder of a 2 person team? I doubt everyone is working 60-80 hrs if a large team. Small teams with large equity interests, probably. (I’ve been there)

I am part of a startup and I can tell you one thing from what I have seen the "CEO" and the people are doing in it. Everyone seems to put all in the effort and everything but generally, the output generation is low. What I mean is, the 80/20 rule applies here a lot. In startups, I have found that it is more about doing experiments and doing them rapidly.

You should take a look at what they are producing and what their current revenue is. That should give you an idea, if putting 80+ hours is REALLY helping them or not?

Sounds like the all-too-common "exploit your tech workers" policy.

I mean, it's hard to really say "exploit" when so many people do so voluntarily. Look back at the classic "The Soul of a New Machine" to see how many people worked overtime to get the machine out.

And then the commentary by the author about how DG staff were worried about people not wanting to work there, only to find that more new graduates wanted to work there precisely to be in that sort of environment.

But there are downsides. The rule-of-thumb is that people can do about 4 hours of creative work per day. See https://www.theweek.com/articles/696644/why-should-work-4-ho... for some commentary (the first DDG hit that seemed relevant; there are many more.)

It's easy to spend more time on non-creative work. But after about 8 hours, the extra time isn't that productive. People start shifting other things to work. When I was a 20-something working grueling hours, I ended up paying bills, socializing, and more .. at work. I was there in body, but not spirit.

What it means is neglecting the rest of your life, like friends, family, and hobbies.

It's a old problem. In Waychoff's "Stories about the B5000 and the people who were there", written in 1979 about the early 1960s, you can read the following, from http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/B5000-AlgolRWaychoff.html :

> There was no time for anything outside of work but eating and sleeping, and darned little of that. We worked over 100 hours every week. One day in July, I was wanting to order some tickets for the Riverside Grand Prix which was the last weekend in October. So I asked Lloyd, in the front of the rest of the group, if I could take off one weekend in October. They all thought it was funny as hell for me to ask for a weekend off four months in advance. It was a good thing that I asked. I really felt guilty when the weekend came and I was the only one that didn't have to work.

> There was especially no time for any outside relationships. My wife and son packed their bags and went to Tulsa saying that they were not coming back until I asked them to. I never asked, so after several weeks she came back and we were divorced. Lloyd and his wife were divorced the same month. She moved back to Dallas. Bobby's wife moved back to Mineola, Texas and I assumed that that were getting a divorce, but I don't think that they ever did. Fred's wife refused to believe that he could be spending that much time at the office, so she concluded that he was seeing another woman. I remember Fred, almost pleading with Lloyd to be able to spend more time at home. Lloyd said ok, but nothing changed. I think Fred's wife left him for a short while, but I'm not sure of that. Dave didn't have any relationships outside of work at the beginning of the. project. and he didn't have time to develop any during the project. By the end of the project, our families were all back together again, temporarily. Now we are all divorced except for Bobby. The reasons for the divorces were not related to the project.

> it seems skeevy techbro at best

It really is. But it can still make a lot of sense for very small teams who are highly invested and/or own the company/product outright. If you're putting in these hours as a salaried employee, you're likely being taken advantage of.

This is the mindset of many companies, not just startups. Just maybe to a lesser degree. My company requires 7.5 hours of work per day (not counting lunch) or 9.5 as a manager. This is a fairly large company. You will never be promoted working close to the minimum even if you have good output/outcomes. It seems like you need to do 50 hours a week minimum to seem engaged and dedicated, and this increases the higher up you go. I was on a product that had all the tech leads working 9 to 11 hours every weekday plus some time on the weekends. There was also an unspoken expectation that you would do some amount of work while on PTO.

It funny how people who will benefit greatly from success (like the founders) expect others who won't really benefit, to work just as hard as they do.

Think of it this way: If you're working regularly for 80 hours a week for someone else... the opportunity cost is you could be starting your own company, literally 40 hours a week. Or you could be a contractor and make extra cash. Ask yourself if you're going to do better, otherwise not a good deal. If you're going to invest that extra time you should have a clear roadmap to understanding why it will benefit you more, and that roadmap should be derived from the company's numbers, not a spreadsheet someone else is trying to sell you on. People will often try to sell you that you're part of 'something bigger' but don't lose sight of the fact you will be getting a much smaller slice of the pie. I'm assuming they're not offering to pay much, because otherwise, they could just hire 2 people.

My own experience has been that long hours tend to correlate with short time windows. If you're in a "deal" oriented business, where deals have a finite and short shelf-life, then that's absolutely normal. But tech? Maybe game dev. during crunch time.

Poorly managed startups could probably also fall inside that...but then again, it really depends on the work / product, and if it's something that needs to be released urgently.

The phrase "all in" scares me. I've only ever been asked to go "all in" once, and I chose to leave in large part because of that request. Now, if I was young with good equity in a promising product that I believed in, then putting all your energies into it might make sense. But most of the time, this is just a declaration that they do not support you as a person, only as a producer for their company.

From the research I’ve seen regarding output at given weekly hours, you cannot sustain productivity beyond 40hrs/wk for more than a month. At some point productivity lowers such that, at best, productivity matches what previously only required 40hrs/wk. At worst working tired creates more work than it solves. Further more, the research I’ve seen suggests that those most likely to be doing negative work are the least likely to recognize it. Couple this with how hard it actually is to measure productivity, and you can end up with some personalities that are convinced the only way they’re as successful as they are is because of the hours that they can easily measure, and maybe don’t realize they’d be equally effective with fewer hours.

That said. I suspect much of the research is only focusing on single work types. Like 40hrs doing thought work or 40hrs doing mindless manual labor. And I have suspicions that you can increase effectiveness by doing tasks that give breaks to you brain or you body and that might get you to 60hrs/wk without burnout. Beyond that though, I’m skeptical. People need time to rest. Bodies have recovery processes that can’t necessarily be sped up, and the brain definitely has rate limits on flushing byproducts of various processes, and muscles take time to recover due to similar rate limits.

I worked these kind of hours:

a) when I developed my first software product and began selling it online ~20 years ago, and

b) as a consultant for a company experiencing a steady stream of fires

Each spanned about a year before settling into a more reasonable pace.

In the first case, I was finishing university and bootstrapping my company on a shoestring budget. I convinced a couple friends to help out here and there, eventually hiring one as my first part-time employee, but until then I wore all the hats. If I had to do it over I would probably drop out to focus solely on the startup, but I expect that just means I'd allocate my time differently not less. No regrets, and I look back on this as one of the most productive periods of my life. I wound up with rock-solid software (manageable enough to support on my own) and an autonomous sales pipeline that repaid my investment of effort with dividends - in time I could arbitrarily take days off for impromptu ski trips after huge snowfalls, and I recall a few where I got a notification part way through the day about a new top-tier sale from someone I'd never heard of (whoot! drinks are on me).

The second was at a company which had, before I got there, oversold its woefully incomplete and buggy enterprise platform. My role was a mix of product and (to some degree) project management, customer account therapy, and mentoring developers. This time I wasn't the only one working outrageous hours; the whole team really stepped up when I came on board. Their previous boss was a VP injected by the company that acquired theirs, a total jerk who gutted morale. The survivors were happy to have someone who actually stuck up for them, outlined a vision to sanity (even if it was imperfect) and was willing to occasionally jump into the trenches and code alongside 'em over weekends to meet a deadline. Part of that stint was at a fixed rate, although I smartened up quick and renegotiated hourly. The difference had no impact on my work ethic (the only change was at one point the CEO dragged me in to complain I was the highest paid person at the company including him - hah!)

Both ordeals definitely entailed sacrifices. Work-life balance wasn't a thing. I developed acute RSI during the first stint, before I learned about ergonomics. Though interestingly, I was physically more fit during these insanely busy periods of my life, as the high level of stress prompted me to run ~3 miles each morning as an effective coping mechanism to stay sane. My brain and ego thrived off the pressure and chronic sense of urgency, although at times it felt wearing and I knew I'd burn out if I tried to maintain it indefinitely. I couldn't imagine attempting this with a family, and the lifestyle certainly delayed any plans there. But one of the devs I worked closest with put in similar hours and he's a father of 5 boys (no idea how he managed).

It allowed me to "not work" for extended periods in between - i.e. take some long vacations, spend time exploring experimental new tech at my own pace, loads of pet projects, even pick up new skills totally outside my wheelhouse. Maybe that fabled work-life balance just played out over a longer timescale...

Now, instead of fighting it, I lean into my natural ebbs and flows of productivity. I confess I wear both experiences like a badge of pride, and my inside-voice silently mocks all you lazy 35-40 hourers ;-)