I'm not sure that John Carmack, someone who's known for his legendary coding ability and work ethic, is going to be representative of most engineers / programmers out there. The term 10x gets thrown around a lot to the point of banality, Carmack is actually one of those 10x humans.
I think the split on these conversations isn't usually between extremely effective people and not-very-effective people, it's usually between people who aspire to be more effective/get more done, and people who think that par is fine.
The discussion in the original post is responding to "Why working fewer hours would make us more productive". We're talking about how to be more productive in general.
2) His general admiration of Elon Musk and positive opinion of a man who flagrantly and regularly violates the very societal norms that have provided him with the opportunities he built his life around.[0]
3) His inability to navigate Facebook/Meta to effect the change he felt was necessary [1]
4) "My core thesis is that the federal government delivers very poor value for the resources it consumes, and that society as a whole would be better off with a government that was less ambitious." (I should have known about this but didn't until relatively recently) [2]
5) The comment he made as the topic of this submission; he's completely out of touch with reality for anyone who isn't him, but doesn't seem to care at all or even really understand what other people might want.
John Carmack's way of thinking is useful for people who want to directly create things themselves, and who don't trust or can't figure out how to motivate or incentivize people to amplify their work.
When I was like that, John Carmack was my hero. Now I realize that to be the most effective version of myself, I need to have relationships with others who make me even better than I could possibly be alone. For that, John Carmack is not a good person to look up to, as he doesn't seem to be capable of growing his reach beyond himself.
So he's not my hero, he's someone I look at and now see all of the flaws that may have already been there, but weren't relevant for the time I valued him as an inspiration.
He knows Elon personally. You know him from media narratives and too online envious activists that desperately want a villain. Spaceman bad. He makes us look like slackers! We want collapse and revolution, he wants to pull civilization into an era of sustainable energy and reusable rockets and maximized freedom.
I'll defer to Carmack's personal experience on this one.
Because the government has restrictions placed on it by the people that private sources of welfare do not. Want to have something to eat? Listen to us proselytize our religion to you for the next hour. Oh, and by the way, our religion requires you to give 10% of what you earn to us.
Am I expected to expend my enthusiasm for programming on my employer?
I find it insulting that I must be a "nine to fiver" if I advocate for labor. My passion isn't building what my boss wants, it's building what _I_ want.
This implies that accepting a job that pays more, even if it doesn't align with your incentives, is being a "nine to fiver", which I disagree with.
Innate to our economic system is the tension between labor and employer. Us as laborers want a higher share of the profit from our labor. Employers seek the opposite, and "fulfillment" provides them the means to extract it.
Consider the wages of game developers, which have stagnated compared to less "fulfilling" SWE work, because employers are able to supplant higher pay with work that people are passionate about. If being a "nine to fiver" prevents me from falling into that trap, so be it.
> Ideally your incentives get aligned such that you're not spending your enthusiasm on your employer, but on yourself via your employer.
If the "via" here is "by giving me money to do what I want", then I agree. GP is arguing that fulfillment from work is necessary to be an enthusiast, thus the assumption that your response is related.
Even in the purely financial scenario though, aren't the incentives still in conflict? If both you and your employer's incentive is "earn as much money as possible", then you are both vying for the same pool of profit.
If you're salaried and you too often work more than nine to five, then you are necessarily devaluing your work. I don't see how devaluing yourself aligns your incentives with the company's incentives, whose incentives are to clearly get as much work done for as little money as possible.
the current meta game is: you work over-time to deliver more and exceed expectations, then you get promotion and +money
if you don't expect promotion, then there is no incentive to over-work and overdeliver.
This is how modern tech companies get ahead of legacy corps: hire young high energy and high capability folks, and let me compete with each other for tiny pool of promotion money. As a result everyone will overwork, but you have to pay only to a few who gets promoted.
> You should be invested in the success of the people who you work for, financially (or whatever you value).
Bullshit. They are trying to make millions for themselves, not me.
I'm trying to make millions for myself through my SaaS that I work on nights/weekends.
If they want to give me founding ownership of their company then I'll reconsider, but otherwise I'm just going to do the work assigned. I'm not going to be enthusiastic or care if it succeeds. I'll just do the work to the best of my ability, and then save the rest of my energy for my business, not theirs.
> They are trying to make millions for themselves, not me.
Why not both?
> If they want to give me founding ownership of their company then I'll reconsider
Now you're getting it, though the "founding" part seems unnecessary. If the money is what drives you, then get a cut. But once you do, your incentives will be aligned and if money really was the issue, then you should be motivated to work whatever hours are needed.
If money wasn't the issue, then incentives weren't aligned correctly.
This is a fundamentally false binary. There are absolutely loads of people who are both of those things, usually due to their enthusiasm for their day job being matched by their enthusiasm for other things.
Im not an enthusiast and really balance work life balance but I get more done when working 9 hours instead of 8. That shouldn’t be a controversial take.
Whether thats worth it or if employers can reasonably expect it is another matter. But absolutely more work gets done. This is a topic where the reddit and hackernoon takes are comically extreme sometimes.
Yep and I am going to get more done in 5 days than 4. Maybe this doesn't play out over a large group but I just find it hard to apply those articles about the 4 day work week actually being more productive to my personal experience.
> those articles about the 4 day work week actually being more productive to my personal experience.
They are conflating diminishing returns with less total work and it leads to ridiculous propositions. If you can get more work done in 4 days it means the 5th day of work is a negative output.
You conveniently ignored the part that modern work is not only about coding, it is a lot about collaborating, politics, reviewing and writing bunch of non-sense paperwork, policies, manuals etc.
I wouldn't mind to work long hours if that would mean purely coding.
But no, employers prefer to throw bunch of non-coding tasks at engineers and introduce politics, the more higher up the chain you go and the more impact you want to make.
If you let me code and get stuff done, I will happy do it.
However if you require me to create dumb paperwork, track JIRA tickets, create reports about reports, demand using the latest TPS REPORT cover on all my deliverables - you will get 9-to-5 PERIOD
> I wouldn't mind to work long hours if that would mean purely coding. But no, employers prefer to throw bunch of non-coding tasks at engineers
You can’t have it both ways. If you want to just code, call yourself a coder or programmer.
An “engineer” is of a profession devoted to “the application of science and mathematics by which the properties of matter and the sources of energy in nature are made useful to people.”
Making your work useful to people involves communication and research beyond coding. Maybe it ain’t jira tickets but it also ain’t “purely coding.”
It is not even engineering.
A lot of software devs have become slaves on the alter of Agile software development. A senseless machine that only cares about the number of your JIRA tickets, and making sure your agile shibboleths like standups, retros, sprints and etc are conducted.
You can look at gogle - the company that has never produced any useful product beyond a few of search/ads, youtube, gmail, and maybe google docs. Thats it. Nothing more.
and gogle is considered very efficient in its engineering processes, that entire industry copies it.
meanwhile the most disruptive innovation comes from small teams that dont care about formalized rituals and jsut focused on execution and coding, they dont need PM, TPM, and Agile Coach, and Engineering manager to deliver value
Ya I think you make a fair point that a lot of non coding work these days probably doesn’t actually improve the product/make it work better for the end user.
I see that as simply bad management, and there is indeed a ton of it. Keep in mind that agile began as a reaction to “waterfall” and was intended to reduce bureaucratic overhead and planning. But the reaction became worse than what it was reacting to.
I think throwing out all process will just lead us back to bad process. Better to have a good process - some sort of planning and system for improvement is good and necessary IMO. Especially if you’re building an organization or iteratively improving product. v1 can arguably be done seat of the pants but what about subsequent versions.
John Carmack's experience of engineering isn't a bunch of meetings, customer-alignment sessions, or anything else though. Apocryphal stories of him measuring everytime he was interrupted are the antithesis of that: they imply he wasn't available to staff, wasn't coordinating with anyone - he was in fact, just coding.
How many people have jobs where "just coding" is actually adequate to do the job? The early years of game development are perhaps the only time this was relevant, and even then it only applies if you work for yourself and not salary.
When 16 hours a day of coding will pop out a game engine a little faster, which gets it to market faster, which gets money into your bank account faster - sure, go nuts. The monetary value of your output is potentially highly disproportionate to the hours input and you the only stakeholder is you.
Of course, if you're spending a stupid number of hours a day coding and disregarding leading your art department, or guiding your other developers, or negotiating with your publishers for funding or deadlines...then you're probably not actually doing your job.
Yeah I used to be a huge contributor of discretionary effort, back when the job was fun. My current agile job is such a chore though that I can't wait to finish for the day.
I can imagine why a person would want to spend more than 40 hours working per week for a limited period of time, but I can't imagine why you would want to stay in that state for a prolonged period of time.
Even if I can be more productive working 9 hour days, so what? I did not get born for being productive.
Long workdays also point at bad planning, lack of proper task delegation or plain old overload. Overload is also bad in the sense that it implies a big backlog, and when you have big backlog, important things get not done.
Fundamentally it's about meaning. People like Carmack find it meaningful to do ambitious projects and push their abilities to the limit. Some goals require more time investment than 40 hours per week.
Obviously not everyone finds that lifestyle appealing, and that's fine. But I don't think it's hard to understand why somebody would spend a lot of time on the thing they truly enjoy doing.
I understand that, but you should probably do your ambitious thing and retire by 40 then. If it takes a whole life, delegation and modest pace are paramount.
Carmack recently started a new company at age 52 with the goal of creating artificial general intelligence. Whether or not that is a realistic goal, I don't think a modest pace is going to maximize his probability of success.
He's not the only one human being on the planet Earth, there's eight billions of us. Somebody else will do it a few months later if he goes to rest and enjoys small things.
You're talking like there is some objectively best way to live life. My point is that meaning is subjective. Maybe for Carmack, resting and "enjoying the small things" would make him less happy than working on projects. Why does your perspective take precedence over everyone else's?
Sure. Training for a marathon puts you at risk of injury. That doesn't mean that everyone who runs a marathon has an injury, or that everyone with ambitious running goals should go relax on the beach instead. Ultimately, there is no objective standpoint from which to say that people should choose different goals, because goals are based on personal subjective values.
>Even ancient Greeks already knew that modesty is the way to go.
Perfect example of the appeal to tradition fallacy.
John Carmack is very passionate about what he does and you'd likely have a hard time convincing him not to do it. Case in point is that he's still working despite likely being rich enough not to.
Most people are working jobs they wouldn't necessarily be doing at all if they had some other means of paying the bills. This is who people are talking about when 4 day work weeks come up.
If you complete X amount of work in 5 days, then switch to 4 days and still complete X amount of work, then it seems like you can actually complete X + X/5 in 5 days instead of X.
I'm not arguing how much you should or shouldn't work. I'm just pushing back against the non-sense that people actually accomplish more by working less.
Thought experiment: someone is forced to work 23 hours a day with 1 hour for sleep, 7 days a week. They will likely be fairly productive the first day, but eventually their productivity per day will be zero as they are too tired to function. Over, say, a month, their productivity will be, lets say, 40 hours (wild guess, maybe 20 hours one day, then a scattering the rest of the month).
Now how about who someone works 4 hours a day, 5 days a week. They are likely productive those 4 hours, and able to sustain that the entire month. So they get 80 hours of productive work done, even though they 'worked less'.
Now those are extremes, but literally working less in this case results in higher productivity in the long run. Now where that point is depends on very many variables (including individual biology, social responsibilities, and type of work). But such a point does exist where working more hours results in less productivity.
Ironically he invalidates his whole point in the second sentence by admitting that there is indeed such a thing as overwork. The rest is an argument that underwork is a thing, which no one denies.
So its really just a debate on ideal hours and the post fails to make an argument there.
Please don't cross into personal attack on HN and please don't post unsubstantive/flamebait comments. You can make your substantive points without any of that.
From the HN guidelines: Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
I don't think Carmack would deny that overwork exists for knowledge workers. He admits that anyone can have a peak and not be at it. I don't think Carmack would deny that a knowledge worker can be overworked and increase their bug output, for example. I do not believe anything I've said is against a strawman.
The strawman is reducing his comment to "really just a debate on ideal hours and the post fails to make an argument there."
It's not about ideal hours at all. I'll post the entire comment here for anybody that might not have clicked through so you can actually decide what it's about.
Quoting Carmack:
I find these “shorter work weeks are just as effective” articles to be nonsense, at least for knowledge workers with some tactical discretion. I can imagine productivity at an assembly line job having a peak such that overworking grinds someone down to the point that they become a liability, but people that claim working nine hours in a day instead of eight gives no (or negative) additional benefit are either being disingenuous or just have terrible work habits. Even in menial jobs, it is sort of insulting – “Hey you, working three jobs to feed your family! Half of the time you are working is actually of negative value so you don’t deserve to be paid for it!”
If you only have seven good hours a day in you, does that mean the rest of the day that you spend with your family, reading, exercising at the gym, or whatever other virtuous activity you would be spending your time on, are all done poorly? No, it just means that focusing on a single thing for an extended period of time is challenging.
Whatever the grand strategy for success is, it gets broken down into lots of smaller tasks. When you hit a wall on one task, you could say “that’s it, I’m done for the day” and head home, or you could switch over to something else that has a different rhythm and get more accomplished. Even when you are clearly not at your peak, there is always plenty to do that doesn’t require your best, and it would actually be a waste to spend your best time on it. You can also “go to the gym” for your work by studying, exploring, and experimenting, spending more hours in service to the goal.
I think most people excited by these articles are confusing not being aligned with their job’s goals with questions of effectiveness. If you don’t want to work, and don’t really care about your work, less hours for the same pay sounds great! If you personally care about what you are doing, you don’t stop at 40 hours a week because you think it is optimal for the work, but rather because you are balancing it against something else that you find equally important. Which is fine.
Given two equally talented people, the one that pursues a goal obsessively, for well over 40 hours a week, is going to achieve more. They might be less happy and healthy, but I’m not even sure about that. Obsession can be rather fulfilling, although probably not across an entire lifetime.
This particular article does touch on a goal that isn’t usually explicitly stated: it would make the world “less unequal” if everyone was prevented from working longer hours. Yes, it would, but I am deeply appalled at the thought of trading away individual freedom of action and additional value in the world for that goal.
1. He doesn't invalidate any of his points in the way you think he does
2. In the most generous interpretation of your reading of him, he frames that amounts over the average 40 hours as sometimes being "underwork", which is absolutely something the some of the "overwork" camp denies
He might have good points, or he might have bad points, but either way it's not because of your additions to the discussion just now. (i.e. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.)
Carmack since the 2000s mostly always worked multiple jobs at less than 40hr. Working 30 hours on software at Id and 30 hours at his rocket thing is about like a half-time employee who does a hobby wood working job on the side. At Meta he eventually became part time CTO less than 40 hours and worked on his AI stuff on the side until fully moving to it.
There is some difference in that he was probably doing lots of programming at all the different jobs, rather than an unrelated hobby (maybe not that different than the woodworking analogy though, he began talking about lathing rocket parts a lot), but 40 hours at one place tended to be too boring to him through large parts of his career more than he lets on in that comment, though the AI stuff came later.
There's also a big difference in working on assigned tasks you maybe disagree with vs deciding which tasks are needed, having power of delegation, etc.
He's also a high level grappler. There are a lot of software people at my BJJ gym. I find it uses many of the same skills as programming.
I know it's not a popular sentiment, but I've always just merged work and non-work. Found jobs I enjoyed and eventually became part owner in a company. In 20 some odds years of working, I've never hated a job like I read people here seem to, so maybe I did something right.
John Carmack is just right on this. Its non-sensical to claim more work gets done in 32 hours compared to 40. You dont have to be pro overtime to recognize this obvious truth.
Sure, there are diminishing returns. And being tired can make a negative impact. But the “actually a 4 day, 8 hour work week is more productive“ claims is completely self serving bullshit.
Just imagine working 4x 8 hour days. Now ask yourself if you can output anything except negative work on that Friday.
I’ve found that 5 x 6 is roughly as productive for me as 5 x 8. 4x8 would be a drop, no doubt. I’ve got approximately 6 good hours per day, and then I’m just not bothering. When I’m really in the flow, I can pull 10 hour days, but that’s fairly rare.
Also, the long term impact on my happiness and well-being can take a while to measure.
I agree that the limiting factor is more about hours per day. Than days per week.
So when working 8 hours instead of 6, there are 2 additional hours where you accomplish nothing? What are you doing? Also consider that even if you aren’t accomplishing anything it doesnt mean you’re getting less work done.
Like I said I recognize there are diminishing returns. But it doesnt make sense to claim you’re actually getting less done.
You’re making some incorrect assumptions. Why do you find it impossible that you can be more productive with 5x6 than 5x8 because you’re more well rested?
If you do 10 work units per hour at 5x6, and you do 6 work units per hour at 5x8 because you're worn out, then 5x6 is more productive.
Your mistake is thinking that the first 6 hours of 5x6 and 5x8 are equally productive. Maybe that’s true. Maybe it isn’t. But to claim that it definitely is and anyone who thinks otherwise doesn’t have common sense is just silly.
Edit: to further clarify, are you claiming that 5x10 is definitely more productive than 5x8? What about 5x16? What about 5x24. Or 7x24? Your confidence that you’re definitely right that 5x8 is better than 5x6 makes me wonder where you know the ideal line is and how you know that.
Day 1: 16 hours, 16 work units
Day 300: 16 hours, 2 work units
Burnout comes in when your pace is unsustainable. We are debating where the sweet spot is. Maybe it's 8 hours a day for you. Maybe it's 10 for Carmack. Maybe it's 6 for me. I don't know, but I doubt it's as obvious or linear as you seem to be thinking.
Would you also say it is non-sensical to claim more work gets done in 40 hours compared to 48? Or perhaps 56 hours?
Why is 40 some magical number to productivity? What if 40 hours leads people to padding out their day with extra bullshit like meetings or needless admin that ends up sucking away more of the time they could spend on their actual work than if they never had to pad things out by only working 32 hours?
For transparency I live in France where the standard work week is 35 hours. Also I've never found the French with their 35 hour work week are less productive than our friends in Asia with 45+ hour work weeks. Regardless of time worked the productivity output is roughly the same for any given week.
> Would you also say it is non-sensical to claim more work gets done in 40 hours compared to 48? Or perhaps 56 hours?
Absolutely. Because all you have to do is not produce negative work beyond 40 hours. You can literally do nothing.
As I said, there is a balance to be struck and diminishing returns are a real thing. But in order for a 4 day work week to be more productive than a 5 day work week then that means your work output on the 5th day is negative.
> But in order for a 4 day work week to be more productive than a 5 day work week then that means your work output on the 5th day is negative.
You are assuming equal productivity (per working hour) in both scenarios. However, it just might be that the worker who just came off a 3-day weekend, and knows they only have to work for 4 days before their next break, will be more productive per hour than someone who just came off a 2-day weekend, and who knows they will need to work for five days before their next break.
Basically, you are assuming that people are robots and get a certain amount of work done per hour regardless of circumstances.
As metabagel said you seem to be basing this on every hour in a persons working week being equal which is obviously not how things really work out.
Do you not find yourself more mentally and physically fatigued at ~35 hours compared to ~25 into the work week?
When do you do your best work? At the start of the work week? Middle? End? Do you feel you do better work after you've had more down time to let your brain "decompress" or whatever you want to call it?
As far as I can tell we stumbled into the ~40 hour work week a long time ago due to physical exhaustion and that exhaustion led to more mistakes and productivity impact due to assembly lines being held up to correct those mistakes, etc.
This makes sense to me and seems like a pretty understandable and reasonable upper limit when it comes to physical jobs such as assembly lines and such.
Why do we just assume that ~40 hours transfers over to knowledge worker jobs? We all know how mentally fatiguing it is after several hours of debugging a tricky issue or trying to design a modern scalable architecture.
Whereas a mistake on an assembly line from a fatigued worker at 40+ hours into the week may put the assembly line out of action for a few hours it that is usually it for the negative impact.
Mistakes in a platform design or a silly bug can easily lead to constant productivity impact and huge costs down the road if that mistake makes it into production. We see it all the time with technical debt.
In your opinion how many hours per working week strikes your balance? How did you get to this number and do you think it is specific to you or more of a general figure that should be the standard?
John Carmack is someone who has, for the most part, had control of what he was working on. During his work hours, he is working on what he wants to work on.
Yes, in that scenario, the right number of hours to maximize productivity and balance with the other things in life is going to be calculated differently.
But for most people, we are working for an employer. We have nearly no control over what our work will entail. We do not give a single flying rat's behind about that work. We do that work solely because capitalism requires us to do some work, and so we do for survival. In this scenario, the correct number of hours to spend working is as few hours we we can get away with while still drawing a salary.
Yeah, listening to Carmack talk about working life is like listening to CEOs talk about pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. Good for them, but not really applicable to 99% of people.
Putting more effort into work doesn't guarantee better results but it certainly could improve the situation for more than 1% of people and to imply otherwise is just as out of touch as a CEO saying "anyone can do it".
Not while working for someone else he didn't. The vast majority of people have no choice and there's no guarantee that hard work will pay off. Hell, more often than not, it just means more will be expected of you in the future and when bonus time comes your boss will complain about constrained budgets.
When you're in a typical salaried position, it's unlikely that you'll be able to extract more money out of your work proportional to the additional effort you put in.
So the question becomes: what else do you get out of it?
Sometimes that can be learning -- maybe go read stuff that's accessible to you but outside of your typical work area -- but in many jobs that's not really possible.
> So the question becomes: what else do you get out of it?
You nothing. But John, John gets it as share owner. He wants employees to work longer hours because he gets any benefit of it but the employees pay with their health and personal life the price. Externalization is called.
Maybe I'm a jaded 44yo at this point, but why would you put your maximum into it unless it's your own business or you have a guaranteed payout for that effort? Not everyone works at a startup, nor are all startups successful.
Look at the big tech layoffs earlier this year - they were letting both the cruft and top tier talent go. Is it easy to say you are truly safe where you are at?
No one will remember or care about your title, your salary, or the effort you put into wherever you work. Your next employer will have no insight into any of that at all outside of your interviews; they'll measure your worth on the job unless you are a world class snowflake.
I'm not saying don't continue to learn and excel! But there's more to life than your day job. Spoken as someone who discovered way too late a proper life/work balance.
Is it worth putting maximum effort into your job if it causes depression and burnout (making you less effective at your job), makes you sick because of stress (making you less effective at your job), ruins your marriage (making you less effective at your job), and gives you less time to educate your kids (making the next generation less effective at their jobs)?
Human effort is burstable, sort of, but for most people it's taxing to burst up to maximum effort. Apparently this isn't true for Carmack, but I have doubts.
I love work. Sometimes I work 50 hours for my full-time employer, and sometimes I work 30 hours for them, and 30 hours for my own side project.
Not everyone loves work as much.
Having the choice to work more or less is good. We should be compensated for whatever value we provide, measured in a way that agrees between employee and employer (or between market and person/business).
It's threatening to equality (wealth disparity) and also social/cultural values (aka work vs. family/neighborhood/community/etc.). These are all important equities, as is enabling high performers to work well. It is apparently difficult to find the right cultural balance that enables maximum achievement and all the rest, too.
I disagree with any top-down pressures to "solve" this tension.
The cultural point is one I hadn't considered before. IIUC, you're saying that if my goal is to work 60 hours a week (for any reason), having 40 hours as the cultural minimum is better than 32.
You could argue that many developers are a net-negative for society given that the industry wastes a lot of time building X idea in Y language for every combination of Y.
There are lots of people that are not as productive. Fine. But it is the moral part that I have a problem with. They are morally proud that they don't contribute to the society.
"Don't be a burden on others" is one of the values I grew up with. Should be a universally good thing IMO.
I could sit on my ass and play games all day, reek in all the unemployment benefits I possibly could, and still be nowhere near the bottom of net contribution to society.
The amount of social benefits that remain in people’s pockets after the grifters have taken their share are rounding errors compared to say bank bailouts and government subsidies (in the US).
I don’t think being a burden on others is good, but it’s nothing compared to active destruction, which can come with huge force multipliers. Every large organization have high ranked people that are rewarded for their destruction. There are entire industries dedicated to leeching off of honest people, like tax prep and time shares.
Seems like this entire thread is strawmaning in the worst possible way. Where did I say that active destruction is moral good? We can condemn both but my point was explicitly to people that don't contribute to society by moral virtue. Yet others making other flimsy strawmen.
> We should be compensated for whatever value we provide, measured in a way that agrees between employee and employer (or between market and person/business).
That is a local optimization that hurts the global output. What is efficient for one individual may be damaging when applied to all society.
Just a theoretical example is that your dedication to work makes you a worse parent, or a non-parent, removing a more knowledgeable, better educated and more healthy human from existing.
I haven't asked my employer, but I suspect they would not be willing to allow me to work a 4-day work week, even if I accepted a commensurately lower salary.
If you only have seven good hours a day in you, does that mean the rest of the day that you spend with your family, reading, exercising at the gym, or whatever other virtuous activity you would be spending your time on, are all done poorly? No
I want to hear what Carmack's wife and kids think.
There's definitely a trade off... that he doesn't acknowledge that indicates to me that his own priorities entirely involve work.
Yeah, I mean every job and person is different. But as a blanket claim I think it's bogus and John's article seems to be pushing back against that in favor of a more nuanced perspective.
It's Carmack, though. He's so far out of the ordinary, I can't take any of his claims in this regards seriously. He's the outlier, and it's difficult from that position to write about what the average worker might be like.
What his comment is missing is that in families where both parents work outside of the home doing a job they are passionate about and would like to spend more time doing, they almost always are not able to work as much as they would like to, either on their actual work, or on side projects. I would love to only have to work 32 hours per week at my current salary and have one day per week to myself when the kiddo is in school. Sometimes I would use this to do "work" (maybe working on things I don't have time to get to in my day-to-day, learning new skills, having and working on side-projects), other times I would use the time to work on the house, do yard work, and other times I might go for a hike, or just sleep. Consistently having time to do activities like these would make me a better worker when I am at work, and a better parent and spouse when I am at home.
"Although John Carmack is a multimillionaire, and his company brings in close to $20 million a year, he is still a self-described workaholic. "I still work 80 hours a week," he admitted to Mark Lisheron of the Austin American-Statesman. "It used to be 80 hours on software, now it's 40 hours on software and 40 hours on Armadillo." Carmack did ease up a bit after he and his wife, Anna Kang, had their first child in 2004—he was getting home from the office at about midnight instead of 2:00 AM or 3:00 AM. Kang, however, insists that Sunday is family day, so Carmack compromises by reading technical manuals to his infant son. "
Unclear how relevant this is given it's age but it's the closest public information you'll find.
Every time I read those type of comments from workaholics, I remember the article on top 5 regrets of hospice people [1]. I think that the age to burn the candle is between 18 and 30 or 35 at most. After that,fuck it, people should live their lives with their means, and work should only be enough to bring food and shelter to home.
That list was compiled anecdotally by a single person, so I think we should take it with a huge grain of salt. It could be subject to confirmation/selection/reporting bias. For all we know, there could just as many or more people dying satisfied with their work accomplishments, or wishing they had worked harder.
>work should only be enough to bring food and shelter to home
What if you take the thing you love doing and make it your life's work?
To each one it's own I guess. I have been crazy passionate about computers for 30 years. Learnt on a Commodore with logo for kids My first computer had GWBASIC and I spent years and years of my life doing so many exciting thing with computers (i even got PHD!!)
But at 41 years old, my priorities have changed. I still get super excited by tech, that's why I advise startups in exchange of equity (so basically for free) and my day job is pretty neat as well (I play with ML, NLP, GPT and other AI technologies) .
But long gone are my days of working 10+ day hours. I sincerely prefer other way less technical stuff in life. I'm visiting my parents quite often, and enjoy spending a lot of time with my wife and kids.
Maybe my previous comment sounded very authoritative, but I just meant to convey my point of view. I have friends who have been working on their startups (as CEOs) like crazy for more than a decade, and they seem to like it.
Personally I just cant see myself wishing I had worked more in my deathbed. Specially for other people LOL. Naaah ,as I've grown older, I've learned to appreciate more the "earthly" things in my life.
Please do not take advice on cognitive science, personal health, finance or relationships from renowned experts who have found immense success in entirely different fields of knowledge.
John Carmack is a very intelligent person who can teach you a lot about many extremely complex engineering-related matters.
Applying his advice on health and work-life balance without a full understanding of the many variables that skew his perspective and his own daily life is probably a bad idea.
Expertise is not automatically domain-transferable. Anyone claiming otherwise is suffering from hubris, or star-struck.
To be honest he is very much commenting about his roam of experience and not as research article but as a personal comment on HN. This should be allowed and should not be discredited as such (as this comment is a comment on the OP and not on someone saying that this comment should be generalized). Being in such an environment with some other obsessed researchers around me and the European court ruling that requires work documentation to be enforced just published. I understand the direction of the comment although I think it can only be applied to very limited situations. The argument seems to be like: do not regulate or discredit drugs because there is some people successfully self optimise with them knowingly taking certain risks...
> Even when you are clearly not at your peak, there is always plenty to do that doesn’t require your best, and it would actually be a waste to spend your best time on it.
It really is. I'm finding that there are some menial programming tasks where I really can just turn off my brain and listen to podcasts while I work and almost let my muscle memory take over.
There are also tasks that require my full undivided attention where having anything on in the background breaks my flow and just lengthens the task. When my brain power is low, it's often from working on these particular tasks and when it helps to switch over to one of the menial tasks.
I also do find, as he says, that it's good time to take on some experimental/exploratory tasks that may use more creativity and less logical thinking.
Seeing when you're depleted in one area but not in another is incredibly powerful and is a great productivity booster. (Of course, there are definitely times where I just cannot muster any energy and those are times where it helps to just step away from the keyboard.)
I use my "low energy" time for the more menial tasks, and during those times often my subconscious surfaces useful ideas. This has been so successful for me over the years that I still haven't bothered to learn regular expressions.
> This particular article does touch on a goal that isn’t usually explicitly stated: it would make the world “less unequal” if everyone was prevented from working longer hours. Yes, it would, but I am deeply appalled at the thought of trading away individual freedom of action and additional value in the world for that goal.
The conclusion that an article discussing productivity research is secret conspiracy against people who want to work a lot of hours, is a bit mind boggling.
He never suggests he's tried working fewer hours. Have to wonder if the guy is just one of those people incapable of taking a break.
Pretty sure that’s the case. He has one deep interest at a time and literally everything else is a distraction from that.
He is a “live to work” person who’s never had to “work to live” since his first couple years when the learning of it was enough to sustain his forward movement.
Sure he has crap work he needs to do, but it’s all in service of what he already cares about. So no cognitive dissonance.
I saw this quote on some other thread recently on HN that is relevant:
General Freiherr von Hammerstein-Equord, the present chief of the German Army, has a method of selecting officers...: “I divide my officers into four classes as follows: The clever, the industrious, the lazy, and the stupid. Each officer always possesses two of these qualities.
Those who are clever and industrious I appoint to the General Staff. Use can under certain circumstances be made of those who are stupid and lazy. The man who is clever and lazy qualifies for the highest leadership posts. He has the requisite nerves and the mental clarity for difficult decisions. But whoever is stupid and industrious must be got rid of, for he is too dangerous.”
Carmack clearly falls into the clever and industrious bracket and his perspective is skewed by his own disposition.
> Whatever the grand strategy for success is, it gets broken down into lots of smaller tasks. When you hit a wall on one task, you could say “that’s it, I’m done for the day” and head home, or you could switch over to something else that has a different rhythm and get more accomplished. Even when you are clearly not at your peak, there is always plenty to do that doesn’t require your best, and it would actually be a waste to spend your best time on it. You can also “go to the gym” for your work by studying, exploring, and experimenting, spending more hours in service to the goal.
Absolutely true.
> I think most people excited by these articles are confusing not being aligned with their job’s goals with questions of effectiveness. If you don’t want to work, and don’t really care about your work, less hours for the same pay sounds great! If you personally care about what you are doing, you don’t stop at 40 hours a week because you think it is optimal for the work, but rather because you are balancing it against something else that you find equally important. Which is fine.
And this is really the key to the whole shorter work week argument. I agree with John; if you are running your own company or initiative in an area you are passionate about, the 40 hour week question probably doesn't even dawn on you. Why would you want to work less to achieve a goal you are ambitious to reach? If anything you are working more because you enjoy it and want to see more progress more quickly.
But most people working a typical job (even in tech) are not in a position to care deeply about their work and its outcomes - why that's the case is a separate discussion and probably differs person-to-person. A good amount of those people might even be working on things during those 40 hours that are a poor use of their individual time due to bad management, bureaucracy, inability to work on things they want to, etc. These people are not able to work 40+ hours things that feel or are as important as other things in their life such as side projects, family, exercise, etc. And so the 5 day, 40 hour workweek feels incompatible with their life.
> But most people working a typical job (even in tech) are not in a position to care deeply about their work and its outcomes
Perhaps most people - after looking at their paystub - are acutely aware that their employer doesn't deeply care about them. In my experience, there is a direct link between how much effort I put in going above and beyond in my work and how much higher (or lower) than average my salary was - with an inverse experience multiplier. I put in lot's of unrewarded effort fresh out of school. I didn't know any better, and probably used work to fill up down-time
Why do you need to put "productivity benefits" in quotes?
I hope I am misinterpreting this. It's been shown scientifically time and time again with actual data that this is the case [1, World Economic Forum] - denying this or being sarcastic about it seems really disingenuous and ideology-driven to me.
Is there someway to do a controlled double-blind study that I just can’t imagine? Because I can definitely imagine other causes in the studies described in that article.
"Most people" don't get to choose, they're stuck with 40. (Or more, for some salaried positions.) The idea is generally "all of your time".
In principle they can just not do those particular jobs. In practice most "careers" expect "full" time.
Some fields are inherently quite flexible, like some doctors/dentists can decide to not schedule anything for a week.
In the linked comment JC said "I am deeply appalled at the thought of trading away individual freedom of action and additional value in the world for that goal."
“ my point is purely about the effective output of an individual. If we were fighting an existential threat, say an asteroid that would hit the earth in a year, would you really tell everyone involved in the project that they should go home after 35 hours a week, because they are harming the project if they work longer?”
— doesn’t this depend on the outcome of your work to fight an existential threat? If you fail then going home after 35hrs was exactly the right thing to do (as you’ve optimized for making the most of your remaining time on earth) if your successful then however many hours you spent was worth it.
Surely this entire argument is pointless unless you know the result of the time you spend?
He tells you literally and exactly what he means: his "point is purely about the effective output of an individual". Emphasis is mine on effective output. His opponents argue that there's a peak in productivity, such that if workers wanted the greatest chance at stopping the asteroid, they should choose to only work 35 hours a week. He argues that this peak either does not exist, or is way more than 35 hours.
It makes more sense when you think of salaried vs hourly. Because hourly people are so obviously useful on long hours that companies will pay 50% more to have them there.
When I'm really motivated on something I will work well in excess of 40 hours, perhaps double that, in a week on it and get drastically more done than I would ever have done limited myself to fewer hours.
Carmack is an exceptional individual, but when it comes to personal productivity, I truly believe it is a unique thing, where everyone must find something that works for them.
Kind of like taste in music - find what you like, and don't be that asshole that judges others for their taste.
For majority of people work is a mean to the end. If they know they'll have to spend more time working, they'll fluff it with more not-actually-work to compensate. That's all there is to it.
An extreme natural workaholic will have a hard time understanding it.
> This particular article does touch on a goal that isn’t usually explicitly stated: it would make the world “less unequal” if everyone was prevented from working longer hours. Yes, it would, but I am deeply appalled at the thought of trading away individual freedom of action and additional value in the world for that goal.
Am I the only person appalled by Carmack's apparent privilege here? In an era when a CEO is routinely making 300x the wage of an average worker, and sometimes thousands of times more, giving people the option to work less for the same amount of wage seems like one of the few ways we can force the ultra-rich to give back? No one is forcing people to work 7 hours and they could easily work more if they wanted to, but reducing the minimum amount of toil required seems to be a net benefit to everyone who is not insanely wealthy.
The fact that John Carmack thinks he needs to respond to articles targeted at the general population is a little bit surprising to me. Is it not obvious to John that he is at least 4-5 standard deviations from the mean here?
I would be more than happy to listen to John talk about what works for him and strategies that he finds effective. But hearing him try and critique articles targeted at the average person or average developer or even average 10x developer... like... Does he not understand how different other people's lives are than his? It reminds me of when you hear politicians try and talk about the struggles of regular people. It is so cringe.
I think he just very rarely has a moment when he’s just really done. Which is probably because he’s mostly worked on things that he wanted to be working on.
I find this mindset easy to replicate when working on my personal projects. Effectiveness may drop a bit after 1am for obvious reasons, but otherwise any hour is much like another.
The problem comes when trying to get yourself to do something that you don’t really want to do, or when you need to deal with the umpteenth time someone broke the same system due to the same mistake or the third discussion in a day where people miss the obvious solution. You can only have so much of that in a day before you mentally check out.
I believe working on something you really want to do is even just one variable. There's also stuff like:
1. Do you have enough ownership to at least sit at the table when it's decided what exactly you work on and how you do it? Can you affect strategy, goals, priorities, timelines and design?
2. Do you reap at least part of the reward (financial, appreciation, status)? Does it feel fair compared to what others get out of it based on their contribution?
3. Does the actual day to day work involve sufficient things that energise you, and few enough things that drain you? Do you have the power to delegate the latter to at least some degree?
I've never met an employee who can answer all of these with yes, but they're crucial for getting things done in a truly motivated and successful fashion, at least for me. Employers don't typically give up more power/rewards than they feel they have to, though.
Ever since I went independent, I have a lot of this. That power over my own work and fortune is a phenomenal motivator, and I really enjoy work these days. I know I can work less if I feel like it, it's my decision. I can only imagine how much _more_ of this Carmack has, being rich, successful and highly respected from a young age. I don't know him, but I'd give him the benefit of the doubt and say he must honestly have no idea what it's like to not have that.
It doesn't seem to me like he is generalizing from his experience and applying it to the general population. He's pushing back on the very specific claim that working fewer hours leads to higher productivity. He admits that this might be true for certain assembly line-type jobs or jobs where someone just wants to collect a paycheck, but it's not necessarily true in the case of knowledge workers who care about what they are working on. I think that applies to a substantial minority of people in developed countries.
He's pushing back on the idea with zero research and zero expertise.
You could literally ask your taxi driver for their thoughts and it would be as helpful.
I prefer to see what the outcomes are from real-world experiments which to date are showing that shorter work weeks can be effective in many situations.
Disagree. Sure, he's not an empirical researcher, but he does have decades of experience being highly productive. I think his opinion holds some weight. He's also clear that he's speaking from personal experience and not making a scientific claim.
> but he does have decades of experience being highly productive
...in software engineering. But then he steers into talk about menial jobs. I worked minimum wage jobs for over a decade before I got an app published. I rather doubt Carmack worked a manual job for very long but perhaps someone can correct me.
He does not have a monopoly on being highly productive.
And I know he is not making a scientific claim because he is not done any research or has any background in this field. So his opinion does have weight. The same weight as literally any other random person on this planet.
Carmack has accomplished more in the span of a few years (e.g. 1992-1997) than most people do in a lifetime. Saying that his opinion about productivity is equivalent to a random person's is just a bad faith argument.
> He's pushing back on the very specific claim that working fewer hours leads to higher productivity.
And rightfully so. Ask anyone who's been through the grind of a startup; for knowledge workers, pulling 80 hour weeks does get shit done faster than working 35 hour weeks. To say otherwise is wishful thinking.
But yes, he was responding specifically to a comment about his work ethic as described Masters of Doom. It's much different when you are working in a small team, on a project you're passionate about, which will make you an enormous amount of money if it succeeds.
Should you put in 80 hour weeks when you are FAANG employee #35,714? Probably not, unless you see some strategic career reason, i.e. project is public and high-profile which you can then leverage to get a job at a competitor for 50% raise, etc.
If you put in 80 hour weeks as FAANG employee #35,714, would you accomplish more? Absolutely. Would your personal life suffer? Absolutely.
> pulling 80 hour weeks does get shit done faster than working 35 hour weeks.
sure in the short run that holds true. its just not sustainable. most people will burn out spectacularly after a few months of this and prolly leave the industry entirely.
I do think that most people won't produce more (of the same quality) working 80 hours/wk unless they are exceptionally motivated.
However, with the right motivation, people will. I'm guessing that what that motivation looks like varies from person to person. For me, it's when I'm starting my own venture.
I'm willing to sacrifice to such an extreme degree for that. I cannot imagine any other company being able to come up with sufficient motivation to make it possible for me to work productively 80 hours/week, though. It's not a matter of me being willing to do it, it's a matter that I wouldn't be able to do it.
After the 5-10 hours a week when you are "in the zone" you start borrowing time. It's possible to sustain productivity for significantly longer than that, but it comes at the expense of rest, which leads to burnout.
When you burn out, you no longer get 5-10 hours of focus per week; that time goes to recovery from last week.
Man this comment resonated with me. I am fully capable of doing productive 80 hour weeks sustainably - I did most weeks for 15 years. Took me that amount of time (and marriage, kids etc.) to realize just because I can doesn't mean I should, especially now that I'm seeing diminishing returns in terms of reward. Still love my work, it has been difficult to dial back honestly.
Where did you find the time for this? That's 14 hrs per day with a two day weekend or 11 hours over seven days.
The 5 day week is 8am to 10pm which is just insane while I could probably do seven days for maybe a month, I definitely couldn't sustain this for fifteen years.
Even when I had a full time job and a PhD to finish, I rarely went over 60 so super curious how you accomplished this.
Wow, more power to you for being able to sustain that, I almost certainly couldn't. I can definitely do six days a week relatively consistently, but seven is definitely a bridge too far for me.
I find it rather cringe that we are judging where Carmack chooses to spend his spare time in a thread about people working less (where he was explicitly mentioned in the parent comment he responded to). In addition to being an engineer, he's a leader of engineering teams. He would benefit more than most from applying cutting edge managerial science in organizations he operates.
As an older engineer I find Carmack's observations interesting and quite accurate.
That’s an important point. In 2016, John Carmack is speaking as a manager who doesn’t even have to show up for his job about wanting to extract more value from the employees working under him on his hobby project. He wants them to work harder on his stupid VR goggles fetish.
It had been more than 20 years since Carmack pulled an all nighter working on Doom, and he’s been coasting along ever since.
Bad data point, plenty of people get divorced whom work regular hours. You’re also making assumptions about the cause of a divorce we frankly know nothing about..
> Given two equally talented people, the one that pursues a goal obsessively, for well over 40 hours a week, is going to achieve more. They might be less happy and healthy, but I’m not even sure about that.
What worked for me and my current partner is being upfront about my career goals and the lengths I was willing to go to achieve them. I’ve now been in a strong relationship for 7+ years which is twice whatever I lasted with other partners who found me sometimes reserving a weekend to work/research a deal killer.
You can make lots of money working 30-35 hour weeks. Perhaps those working 60 hours a week just aren’t as clever, or haven’t found a valuable enough niche.
Like, could I make the same money for half the time if I e.g. started my own gig? Maybe. But maybe is not good enough, and with a spouse, kids and a mortgage, I can't afford to test it - it would put my family at too big of a risk.
I think you are reading too much into it. All I shared is something that helped me find a partner who enjoyed who I am and understood my priorities. I was hoping to help. The advice sure would have helped me earlier in life.
This is a silly point to make and discuss because the goal is not defined. If your number one goal is to build a company then other sacrifices along the way won't necessarily make you unhappy. If your goal was to maintain a happy family and that falls apart, guess what: you will not be happy.
I think this is just cliche Hollywood trope that’s not even true. Most divorces don’t have the husband working too long and not paying attention to family trope. It’s very possible John with normal working hours would still have gotten divorced, most divorces I know didn’t have long working hours as a reason. Marriages go to shit for a large variety of reasons, and not often because husband spent too long working, that is a very small fraction of divorces. There was a time when I judged someone by the fact that they are divorced, but now I don’t anymore. Sometimes she just wants different things and figured that out after marriage, there’s nothing you can do really
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Most (all probably) people aspire to be more in whatever their passion is.
He's kind of gone off the deep end now, though given this comment he may have always been a little out of touch with reality.
He was a hero of mine, but now isn't (and IMO that's fine).
2) His general admiration of Elon Musk and positive opinion of a man who flagrantly and regularly violates the very societal norms that have provided him with the opportunities he built his life around.[0]
3) His inability to navigate Facebook/Meta to effect the change he felt was necessary [1]
4) "My core thesis is that the federal government delivers very poor value for the resources it consumes, and that society as a whole would be better off with a government that was less ambitious." (I should have known about this but didn't until relatively recently) [2]
5) The comment he made as the topic of this submission; he's completely out of touch with reality for anyone who isn't him, but doesn't seem to care at all or even really understand what other people might want.
John Carmack's way of thinking is useful for people who want to directly create things themselves, and who don't trust or can't figure out how to motivate or incentivize people to amplify their work.
When I was like that, John Carmack was my hero. Now I realize that to be the most effective version of myself, I need to have relationships with others who make me even better than I could possibly be alone. For that, John Carmack is not a good person to look up to, as he doesn't seem to be capable of growing his reach beyond himself.
So he's not my hero, he's someone I look at and now see all of the flaws that may have already been there, but weren't relevant for the time I valued him as an inspiration.
[0] https://mleverything.substack.com/p/elon-musk-john-carmack-a...
[1] https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/12/john-carmack-leaves-m...
[2] https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=1895320834...
I'll defer to Carmack's personal experience on this one.
It's clear to me Carmack lacks empathy, so his slide into American right-wing adjacent views is pretty on par.
I was asked why I no longer consider Carmack a hero, and I gave my reasons. I don't really care if you believe me or not.
I find it insulting that I must be a "nine to fiver" if I advocate for labor. My passion isn't building what my boss wants, it's building what _I_ want.
This requirement precludes finding work you enjoy, and thus those that have the opportunity to work on something they like are in the minority.
Put another way, would you quit your job immediately if you're asked to work on something you don't want to do? If not, are you a "nine to fiver"?
You should be invested in the success of the people who you work for, financially (or whatever you value).
You're a "nine to fiver" if your incentives don't align. That can be your fault, but often isn't.
Innate to our economic system is the tension between labor and employer. Us as laborers want a higher share of the profit from our labor. Employers seek the opposite, and "fulfillment" provides them the means to extract it.
Consider the wages of game developers, which have stagnated compared to less "fulfilling" SWE work, because employers are able to supplant higher pay with work that people are passionate about. If being a "nine to fiver" prevents me from falling into that trap, so be it.
If the "via" here is "by giving me money to do what I want", then I agree. GP is arguing that fulfillment from work is necessary to be an enthusiast, thus the assumption that your response is related.
Even in the purely financial scenario though, aren't the incentives still in conflict? If both you and your employer's incentive is "earn as much money as possible", then you are both vying for the same pool of profit.
And I never said there wouldn't ever be conflict, though if you fail to see the value provided to you by your employer, that's on you.
if you don't expect promotion, then there is no incentive to over-work and overdeliver.
This is how modern tech companies get ahead of legacy corps: hire young high energy and high capability folks, and let me compete with each other for tiny pool of promotion money. As a result everyone will overwork, but you have to pay only to a few who gets promoted.
Bullshit. They are trying to make millions for themselves, not me.
I'm trying to make millions for myself through my SaaS that I work on nights/weekends.
If they want to give me founding ownership of their company then I'll reconsider, but otherwise I'm just going to do the work assigned. I'm not going to be enthusiastic or care if it succeeds. I'll just do the work to the best of my ability, and then save the rest of my energy for my business, not theirs.
Why not both?
> If they want to give me founding ownership of their company then I'll reconsider
Now you're getting it, though the "founding" part seems unnecessary. If the money is what drives you, then get a cut. But once you do, your incentives will be aligned and if money really was the issue, then you should be motivated to work whatever hours are needed.
If money wasn't the issue, then incentives weren't aligned correctly.
Whether thats worth it or if employers can reasonably expect it is another matter. But absolutely more work gets done. This is a topic where the reddit and hackernoon takes are comically extreme sometimes.
They are conflating diminishing returns with less total work and it leads to ridiculous propositions. If you can get more work done in 4 days it means the 5th day of work is a negative output.
I wouldn't mind to work long hours if that would mean purely coding.
But no, employers prefer to throw bunch of non-coding tasks at engineers and introduce politics, the more higher up the chain you go and the more impact you want to make.
If you let me code and get stuff done, I will happy do it.
However if you require me to create dumb paperwork, track JIRA tickets, create reports about reports, demand using the latest TPS REPORT cover on all my deliverables - you will get 9-to-5 PERIOD
You can’t have it both ways. If you want to just code, call yourself a coder or programmer.
An “engineer” is of a profession devoted to “the application of science and mathematics by which the properties of matter and the sources of energy in nature are made useful to people.”
Making your work useful to people involves communication and research beyond coding. Maybe it ain’t jira tickets but it also ain’t “purely coding.”
You can look at gogle - the company that has never produced any useful product beyond a few of search/ads, youtube, gmail, and maybe google docs. Thats it. Nothing more.
and gogle is considered very efficient in its engineering processes, that entire industry copies it.
meanwhile the most disruptive innovation comes from small teams that dont care about formalized rituals and jsut focused on execution and coding, they dont need PM, TPM, and Agile Coach, and Engineering manager to deliver value
I see that as simply bad management, and there is indeed a ton of it. Keep in mind that agile began as a reaction to “waterfall” and was intended to reduce bureaucratic overhead and planning. But the reaction became worse than what it was reacting to.
I think throwing out all process will just lead us back to bad process. Better to have a good process - some sort of planning and system for improvement is good and necessary IMO. Especially if you’re building an organization or iteratively improving product. v1 can arguably be done seat of the pants but what about subsequent versions.
How many people have jobs where "just coding" is actually adequate to do the job? The early years of game development are perhaps the only time this was relevant, and even then it only applies if you work for yourself and not salary.
When 16 hours a day of coding will pop out a game engine a little faster, which gets it to market faster, which gets money into your bank account faster - sure, go nuts. The monetary value of your output is potentially highly disproportionate to the hours input and you the only stakeholder is you.
Of course, if you're spending a stupid number of hours a day coding and disregarding leading your art department, or guiding your other developers, or negotiating with your publishers for funding or deadlines...then you're probably not actually doing your job.
Even if I can be more productive working 9 hour days, so what? I did not get born for being productive.
Long workdays also point at bad planning, lack of proper task delegation or plain old overload. Overload is also bad in the sense that it implies a big backlog, and when you have big backlog, important things get not done.
Obviously not everyone finds that lifestyle appealing, and that's fine. But I don't think it's hard to understand why somebody would spend a lot of time on the thing they truly enjoy doing.
Sure. Training for a marathon puts you at risk of injury. That doesn't mean that everyone who runs a marathon has an injury, or that everyone with ambitious running goals should go relax on the beach instead. Ultimately, there is no objective standpoint from which to say that people should choose different goals, because goals are based on personal subjective values.
>Even ancient Greeks already knew that modesty is the way to go.
Perfect example of the appeal to tradition fallacy.
Most people are working jobs they wouldn't necessarily be doing at all if they had some other means of paying the bills. This is who people are talking about when 4 day work weeks come up.
I'm not arguing how much you should or shouldn't work. I'm just pushing back against the non-sense that people actually accomplish more by working less.
Now how about who someone works 4 hours a day, 5 days a week. They are likely productive those 4 hours, and able to sustain that the entire month. So they get 80 hours of productive work done, even though they 'worked less'.
Now those are extremes, but literally working less in this case results in higher productivity in the long run. Now where that point is depends on very many variables (including individual biology, social responsibilities, and type of work). But such a point does exist where working more hours results in less productivity.
I could probably get all my required work done in 3 days if I were incentivized to
So its really just a debate on ideal hours and the post fails to make an argument there.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
You are constructing a strawman. Go read his comment again. He differentiates between knowledge work and physical work.
It's not about ideal hours at all. I'll post the entire comment here for anybody that might not have clicked through so you can actually decide what it's about.
Quoting Carmack:
I find these “shorter work weeks are just as effective” articles to be nonsense, at least for knowledge workers with some tactical discretion. I can imagine productivity at an assembly line job having a peak such that overworking grinds someone down to the point that they become a liability, but people that claim working nine hours in a day instead of eight gives no (or negative) additional benefit are either being disingenuous or just have terrible work habits. Even in menial jobs, it is sort of insulting – “Hey you, working three jobs to feed your family! Half of the time you are working is actually of negative value so you don’t deserve to be paid for it!”
If you only have seven good hours a day in you, does that mean the rest of the day that you spend with your family, reading, exercising at the gym, or whatever other virtuous activity you would be spending your time on, are all done poorly? No, it just means that focusing on a single thing for an extended period of time is challenging.
Whatever the grand strategy for success is, it gets broken down into lots of smaller tasks. When you hit a wall on one task, you could say “that’s it, I’m done for the day” and head home, or you could switch over to something else that has a different rhythm and get more accomplished. Even when you are clearly not at your peak, there is always plenty to do that doesn’t require your best, and it would actually be a waste to spend your best time on it. You can also “go to the gym” for your work by studying, exploring, and experimenting, spending more hours in service to the goal.
I think most people excited by these articles are confusing not being aligned with their job’s goals with questions of effectiveness. If you don’t want to work, and don’t really care about your work, less hours for the same pay sounds great! If you personally care about what you are doing, you don’t stop at 40 hours a week because you think it is optimal for the work, but rather because you are balancing it against something else that you find equally important. Which is fine.
Given two equally talented people, the one that pursues a goal obsessively, for well over 40 hours a week, is going to achieve more. They might be less happy and healthy, but I’m not even sure about that. Obsession can be rather fulfilling, although probably not across an entire lifetime.
This particular article does touch on a goal that isn’t usually explicitly stated: it would make the world “less unequal” if everyone was prevented from working longer hours. Yes, it would, but I am deeply appalled at the thought of trading away individual freedom of action and additional value in the world for that goal.
1. He doesn't invalidate any of his points in the way you think he does
2. In the most generous interpretation of your reading of him, he frames that amounts over the average 40 hours as sometimes being "underwork", which is absolutely something the some of the "overwork" camp denies
He might have good points, or he might have bad points, but either way it's not because of your additions to the discussion just now. (i.e. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.)
There is some difference in that he was probably doing lots of programming at all the different jobs, rather than an unrelated hobby (maybe not that different than the woodworking analogy though, he began talking about lathing rocket parts a lot), but 40 hours at one place tended to be too boring to him through large parts of his career more than he lets on in that comment, though the AI stuff came later.
There's also a big difference in working on assigned tasks you maybe disagree with vs deciding which tasks are needed, having power of delegation, etc.
I know it's not a popular sentiment, but I've always just merged work and non-work. Found jobs I enjoyed and eventually became part owner in a company. In 20 some odds years of working, I've never hated a job like I read people here seem to, so maybe I did something right.
Sure, there are diminishing returns. And being tired can make a negative impact. But the “actually a 4 day, 8 hour work week is more productive“ claims is completely self serving bullshit.
Just imagine working 4x 8 hour days. Now ask yourself if you can output anything except negative work on that Friday.
Also, the long term impact on my happiness and well-being can take a while to measure.
So when working 8 hours instead of 6, there are 2 additional hours where you accomplish nothing? What are you doing? Also consider that even if you aren’t accomplishing anything it doesnt mean you’re getting less work done.
Like I said I recognize there are diminishing returns. But it doesnt make sense to claim you’re actually getting less done.
If you do 10 work units per hour at 5x6, and you do 6 work units per hour at 5x8 because you're worn out, then 5x6 is more productive.
Your mistake is thinking that the first 6 hours of 5x6 and 5x8 are equally productive. Maybe that’s true. Maybe it isn’t. But to claim that it definitely is and anyone who thinks otherwise doesn’t have common sense is just silly.
Edit: to further clarify, are you claiming that 5x10 is definitely more productive than 5x8? What about 5x16? What about 5x24. Or 7x24? Your confidence that you’re definitely right that 5x8 is better than 5x6 makes me wonder where you know the ideal line is and how you know that.
If you work 6 hours a day and produce 10 work units, does working an additional 2 hours really just reduce your previous work output 40%?
Day 1: 16 hours, 16 work units Day 300: 16 hours, 2 work units
Burnout comes in when your pace is unsustainable. We are debating where the sweet spot is. Maybe it's 8 hours a day for you. Maybe it's 10 for Carmack. Maybe it's 6 for me. I don't know, but I doubt it's as obvious or linear as you seem to be thinking.
Why is 40 some magical number to productivity? What if 40 hours leads people to padding out their day with extra bullshit like meetings or needless admin that ends up sucking away more of the time they could spend on their actual work than if they never had to pad things out by only working 32 hours?
For transparency I live in France where the standard work week is 35 hours. Also I've never found the French with their 35 hour work week are less productive than our friends in Asia with 45+ hour work weeks. Regardless of time worked the productivity output is roughly the same for any given week.
Absolutely. Because all you have to do is not produce negative work beyond 40 hours. You can literally do nothing.
As I said, there is a balance to be struck and diminishing returns are a real thing. But in order for a 4 day work week to be more productive than a 5 day work week then that means your work output on the 5th day is negative.
You are assuming equal productivity (per working hour) in both scenarios. However, it just might be that the worker who just came off a 3-day weekend, and knows they only have to work for 4 days before their next break, will be more productive per hour than someone who just came off a 2-day weekend, and who knows they will need to work for five days before their next break.
Basically, you are assuming that people are robots and get a certain amount of work done per hour regardless of circumstances.
Do you not find yourself more mentally and physically fatigued at ~35 hours compared to ~25 into the work week?
When do you do your best work? At the start of the work week? Middle? End? Do you feel you do better work after you've had more down time to let your brain "decompress" or whatever you want to call it?
As far as I can tell we stumbled into the ~40 hour work week a long time ago due to physical exhaustion and that exhaustion led to more mistakes and productivity impact due to assembly lines being held up to correct those mistakes, etc.
This makes sense to me and seems like a pretty understandable and reasonable upper limit when it comes to physical jobs such as assembly lines and such.
Why do we just assume that ~40 hours transfers over to knowledge worker jobs? We all know how mentally fatiguing it is after several hours of debugging a tricky issue or trying to design a modern scalable architecture.
Whereas a mistake on an assembly line from a fatigued worker at 40+ hours into the week may put the assembly line out of action for a few hours it that is usually it for the negative impact.
Mistakes in a platform design or a silly bug can easily lead to constant productivity impact and huge costs down the road if that mistake makes it into production. We see it all the time with technical debt.
In your opinion how many hours per working week strikes your balance? How did you get to this number and do you think it is specific to you or more of a general figure that should be the standard?
Yes, in that scenario, the right number of hours to maximize productivity and balance with the other things in life is going to be calculated differently.
But for most people, we are working for an employer. We have nearly no control over what our work will entail. We do not give a single flying rat's behind about that work. We do that work solely because capitalism requires us to do some work, and so we do for survival. In this scenario, the correct number of hours to spend working is as few hours we we can get away with while still drawing a salary.
So the question becomes: what else do you get out of it?
Sometimes that can be learning -- maybe go read stuff that's accessible to you but outside of your typical work area -- but in many jobs that's not really possible.
You nothing. But John, John gets it as share owner. He wants employees to work longer hours because he gets any benefit of it but the employees pay with their health and personal life the price. Externalization is called.
Look at the big tech layoffs earlier this year - they were letting both the cruft and top tier talent go. Is it easy to say you are truly safe where you are at?
No one will remember or care about your title, your salary, or the effort you put into wherever you work. Your next employer will have no insight into any of that at all outside of your interviews; they'll measure your worth on the job unless you are a world class snowflake.
I'm not saying don't continue to learn and excel! But there's more to life than your day job. Spoken as someone who discovered way too late a proper life/work balance.
Human effort is burstable, sort of, but for most people it's taxing to burst up to maximum effort. Apparently this isn't true for Carmack, but I have doubts.
Not everyone loves work as much.
Having the choice to work more or less is good. We should be compensated for whatever value we provide, measured in a way that agrees between employee and employer (or between market and person/business).
So what's the problem?
I disagree with any top-down pressures to "solve" this tension.
You could argue that many developers are a net-negative for society given that the industry wastes a lot of time building X idea in Y language for every combination of Y.
"Don't be a burden on others" is one of the values I grew up with. Should be a universally good thing IMO.
The amount of social benefits that remain in people’s pockets after the grifters have taken their share are rounding errors compared to say bank bailouts and government subsidies (in the US).
I don’t think being a burden on others is good, but it’s nothing compared to active destruction, which can come with huge force multipliers. Every large organization have high ranked people that are rewarded for their destruction. There are entire industries dedicated to leeching off of honest people, like tax prep and time shares.
Rather than pretending that their latest open source project which is 99% the same as a dozen others is some extraordinary contribution to society.
That is a local optimization that hurts the global output. What is efficient for one individual may be damaging when applied to all society.
Just a theoretical example is that your dedication to work makes you a worse parent, or a non-parent, removing a more knowledgeable, better educated and more healthy human from existing.
I want to hear what Carmack's wife and kids think.
There's definitely a trade off... that he doesn't acknowledge that indicates to me that his own priorities entirely involve work.
Unclear how relevant this is given it's age but it's the closest public information you'll find.
[1]https://www.notablebiographies.com/news/A-Ca/Carmack-John.ht...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2012/feb/01/top-fiv...
>work should only be enough to bring food and shelter to home
What if you take the thing you love doing and make it your life's work?
But at 41 years old, my priorities have changed. I still get super excited by tech, that's why I advise startups in exchange of equity (so basically for free) and my day job is pretty neat as well (I play with ML, NLP, GPT and other AI technologies) .
But long gone are my days of working 10+ day hours. I sincerely prefer other way less technical stuff in life. I'm visiting my parents quite often, and enjoy spending a lot of time with my wife and kids.
Maybe my previous comment sounded very authoritative, but I just meant to convey my point of view. I have friends who have been working on their startups (as CEOs) like crazy for more than a decade, and they seem to like it.
Personally I just cant see myself wishing I had worked more in my deathbed. Specially for other people LOL. Naaah ,as I've grown older, I've learned to appreciate more the "earthly" things in my life.
FWIW, they divorced a couple years ago.
John Carmack is a very intelligent person who can teach you a lot about many extremely complex engineering-related matters.
Applying his advice on health and work-life balance without a full understanding of the many variables that skew his perspective and his own daily life is probably a bad idea.
Expertise is not automatically domain-transferable. Anyone claiming otherwise is suffering from hubris, or star-struck.
Wow, that's a great quote.
There are also tasks that require my full undivided attention where having anything on in the background breaks my flow and just lengthens the task. When my brain power is low, it's often from working on these particular tasks and when it helps to switch over to one of the menial tasks.
I also do find, as he says, that it's good time to take on some experimental/exploratory tasks that may use more creativity and less logical thinking.
Seeing when you're depleted in one area but not in another is incredibly powerful and is a great productivity booster. (Of course, there are definitely times where I just cannot muster any energy and those are times where it helps to just step away from the keyboard.)
The conclusion that an article discussing productivity research is secret conspiracy against people who want to work a lot of hours, is a bit mind boggling.
He never suggests he's tried working fewer hours. Have to wonder if the guy is just one of those people incapable of taking a break.
He is a “live to work” person who’s never had to “work to live” since his first couple years when the learning of it was enough to sustain his forward movement.
Sure he has crap work he needs to do, but it’s all in service of what he already cares about. So no cognitive dissonance.
General Freiherr von Hammerstein-Equord, the present chief of the German Army, has a method of selecting officers...: “I divide my officers into four classes as follows: The clever, the industrious, the lazy, and the stupid. Each officer always possesses two of these qualities.
Those who are clever and industrious I appoint to the General Staff. Use can under certain circumstances be made of those who are stupid and lazy. The man who is clever and lazy qualifies for the highest leadership posts. He has the requisite nerves and the mental clarity for difficult decisions. But whoever is stupid and industrious must be got rid of, for he is too dangerous.”
Carmack clearly falls into the clever and industrious bracket and his perspective is skewed by his own disposition.
Absolutely true.
> I think most people excited by these articles are confusing not being aligned with their job’s goals with questions of effectiveness. If you don’t want to work, and don’t really care about your work, less hours for the same pay sounds great! If you personally care about what you are doing, you don’t stop at 40 hours a week because you think it is optimal for the work, but rather because you are balancing it against something else that you find equally important. Which is fine.
And this is really the key to the whole shorter work week argument. I agree with John; if you are running your own company or initiative in an area you are passionate about, the 40 hour week question probably doesn't even dawn on you. Why would you want to work less to achieve a goal you are ambitious to reach? If anything you are working more because you enjoy it and want to see more progress more quickly.
But most people working a typical job (even in tech) are not in a position to care deeply about their work and its outcomes - why that's the case is a separate discussion and probably differs person-to-person. A good amount of those people might even be working on things during those 40 hours that are a poor use of their individual time due to bad management, bureaucracy, inability to work on things they want to, etc. These people are not able to work 40+ hours things that feel or are as important as other things in their life such as side projects, family, exercise, etc. And so the 5 day, 40 hour workweek feels incompatible with their life.
Perhaps most people - after looking at their paystub - are acutely aware that their employer doesn't deeply care about them. In my experience, there is a direct link between how much effort I put in going above and beyond in my work and how much higher (or lower) than average my salary was - with an inverse experience multiplier. I put in lot's of unrewarded effort fresh out of school. I didn't know any better, and probably used work to fill up down-time
I hope I am misinterpreting this. It's been shown scientifically time and time again with actual data that this is the case [1, World Economic Forum] - denying this or being sarcastic about it seems really disingenuous and ideology-driven to me.
[1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2023/03/surprising-benefits-f...
In principle they can just not do those particular jobs. In practice most "careers" expect "full" time.
Some fields are inherently quite flexible, like some doctors/dentists can decide to not schedule anything for a week.
In the linked comment JC said "I am deeply appalled at the thought of trading away individual freedom of action and additional value in the world for that goal."
But the point is that freedom is ephemeral. The world has all sorts of incentives that promote race-to-the-bottom behaviors (cf. https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/Meditations-On-Moloch )
In the good ol' days at least a family might likely have the mom at home with the kids even if dad gave blood to Moloch every day.
— doesn’t this depend on the outcome of your work to fight an existential threat? If you fail then going home after 35hrs was exactly the right thing to do (as you’ve optimized for making the most of your remaining time on earth) if your successful then however many hours you spent was worth it.
Surely this entire argument is pointless unless you know the result of the time you spend?
Kind of like taste in music - find what you like, and don't be that asshole that judges others for their taste.
An extreme natural workaholic will have a hard time understanding it.
Am I the only person appalled by Carmack's apparent privilege here? In an era when a CEO is routinely making 300x the wage of an average worker, and sometimes thousands of times more, giving people the option to work less for the same amount of wage seems like one of the few ways we can force the ultra-rich to give back? No one is forcing people to work 7 hours and they could easily work more if they wanted to, but reducing the minimum amount of toil required seems to be a net benefit to everyone who is not insanely wealthy.
People that want to work 12 hour days should be allowed to.
I would be more than happy to listen to John talk about what works for him and strategies that he finds effective. But hearing him try and critique articles targeted at the average person or average developer or even average 10x developer... like... Does he not understand how different other people's lives are than his? It reminds me of when you hear politicians try and talk about the struggles of regular people. It is so cringe.
I find this mindset easy to replicate when working on my personal projects. Effectiveness may drop a bit after 1am for obvious reasons, but otherwise any hour is much like another.
The problem comes when trying to get yourself to do something that you don’t really want to do, or when you need to deal with the umpteenth time someone broke the same system due to the same mistake or the third discussion in a day where people miss the obvious solution. You can only have so much of that in a day before you mentally check out.
1. Do you have enough ownership to at least sit at the table when it's decided what exactly you work on and how you do it? Can you affect strategy, goals, priorities, timelines and design?
2. Do you reap at least part of the reward (financial, appreciation, status)? Does it feel fair compared to what others get out of it based on their contribution?
3. Does the actual day to day work involve sufficient things that energise you, and few enough things that drain you? Do you have the power to delegate the latter to at least some degree?
I've never met an employee who can answer all of these with yes, but they're crucial for getting things done in a truly motivated and successful fashion, at least for me. Employers don't typically give up more power/rewards than they feel they have to, though.
Ever since I went independent, I have a lot of this. That power over my own work and fortune is a phenomenal motivator, and I really enjoy work these days. I know I can work less if I feel like it, it's my decision. I can only imagine how much _more_ of this Carmack has, being rich, successful and highly respected from a young age. I don't know him, but I'd give him the benefit of the doubt and say he must honestly have no idea what it's like to not have that.
You could literally ask your taxi driver for their thoughts and it would be as helpful.
I prefer to see what the outcomes are from real-world experiments which to date are showing that shorter work weeks can be effective in many situations.
...in software engineering. But then he steers into talk about menial jobs. I worked minimum wage jobs for over a decade before I got an app published. I rather doubt Carmack worked a manual job for very long but perhaps someone can correct me.
And I know he is not making a scientific claim because he is not done any research or has any background in this field. So his opinion does have weight. The same weight as literally any other random person on this planet.
At some point he crashes but it’s not at 40hrs.
Is there variance in how long people can work without degraded performance? Of course. But it still degrades for most people.
And rightfully so. Ask anyone who's been through the grind of a startup; for knowledge workers, pulling 80 hour weeks does get shit done faster than working 35 hour weeks. To say otherwise is wishful thinking.
But yes, he was responding specifically to a comment about his work ethic as described Masters of Doom. It's much different when you are working in a small team, on a project you're passionate about, which will make you an enormous amount of money if it succeeds.
Should you put in 80 hour weeks when you are FAANG employee #35,714? Probably not, unless you see some strategic career reason, i.e. project is public and high-profile which you can then leverage to get a job at a competitor for 50% raise, etc.
If you put in 80 hour weeks as FAANG employee #35,714, would you accomplish more? Absolutely. Would your personal life suffer? Absolutely.
sure in the short run that holds true. its just not sustainable. most people will burn out spectacularly after a few months of this and prolly leave the industry entirely.
I do think that most people won't produce more (of the same quality) working 80 hours/wk unless they are exceptionally motivated.
However, with the right motivation, people will. I'm guessing that what that motivation looks like varies from person to person. For me, it's when I'm starting my own venture.
I'm willing to sacrifice to such an extreme degree for that. I cannot imagine any other company being able to come up with sufficient motivation to make it possible for me to work productively 80 hours/week, though. It's not a matter of me being willing to do it, it's a matter that I wouldn't be able to do it.
The question is do you have more work done after 35+X hours than you did at 35?
If not, what were the X hours actually doing? Decompiling?
When you burn out, you no longer get 5-10 hours of focus per week; that time goes to recovery from last week.
The 5 day week is 8am to 10pm which is just insane while I could probably do seven days for maybe a month, I definitely couldn't sustain this for fifteen years.
Even when I had a full time job and a PhD to finish, I rarely went over 60 so super curious how you accomplished this.
As an older engineer I find Carmack's observations interesting and quite accurate.
It had been more than 20 years since Carmack pulled an all nighter working on Doom, and he’s been coasting along ever since.
Working your ass off makes you more productive, yes, but it comes at a cost. Personal time, family time, etc…
> Given two equally talented people, the one that pursues a goal obsessively, for well over 40 hours a week, is going to achieve more. They might be less happy and healthy, but I’m not even sure about that.
What worked for me and my current partner is being upfront about my career goals and the lengths I was willing to go to achieve them. I’ve now been in a strong relationship for 7+ years which is twice whatever I lasted with other partners who found me sometimes reserving a weekend to work/research a deal killer.
Like, could I make the same money for half the time if I e.g. started my own gig? Maybe. But maybe is not good enough, and with a spouse, kids and a mortgage, I can't afford to test it - it would put my family at too big of a risk.
But sometimes it’s something you can moonlight.
“It’s not that bad” says the guy leaving a trail of women in the wake of his career.
For example, most people’s goal is closer to “work just enough to live comfortably” than they’d like to admit, I suspect.