When Mayer suspects an employee might burn out, she asks them to find their rhythm. They've come back with, "I need to be home for Tuesday night dinners," or "I need to be on time for my daughter's soccer games."
really bothers me. If employee burnout is a regular thing inside your organization, that's a serious issue that needs solving. But to have to ask permission to spend time with your family is ridiculous.
If you're working 130 hours a week, something is seriously, seriously wrong.
That you would only be "granted" to have time for your family if you're on the brink of burn-out is ... horrible. I'm pretty sure that's not the general guideline about how Google operates, not sure if there's some editing and/or language barrier here.
I don't think there is any such barrier. I've read multiple articles from multiple publications about the same Marissa Mayer, and they all have the same anecdotes and themes. If it's so consistent across multiple publications, you have to think she really does say all these things. Whether she walks the talk is another question, but she's probably a freak of nature who is really able to do so.
Moreover, the legend of the über-productive employee who never sleeps is a double-edged sword and can demotivate the employees that person touches in ways that far outweigh the direct positive impact to the company that person has. As stated above, it's one thing to work 12-16hr days during start-up phase, but if you're doing it as a matter of fact when you're a 30,000 person company, frankly you're doing it wrong -- even if you're the founder, owner, board member or C-level executive. Leading via exemplary personal performance and ethics is one thing; driving those values throughout the organization is far more important.
Yeah. You know how I avoid burnout? I work 8 hours a day, no more no less. Occasionally, I will work a 9 hour day, but that's a rarity. If I can't get done what I need to do in an 8 hour day, well it just has to wait until tomorrow. Perhaps I'll put in two three hour days on the weekends. Either way, I am a programmer, and I am at my best when I program for 6 hours or less per day. The more time I spend thinking about an issue, the better my programs will be. If I am going to be sitting at my desk, coding away, for 12 hours straight, you will see some sorry excuse for code because I haven't thought through the whole process.
I get the feeling that the article was more written with the mind of the early days of Google- where one employee working 130 hour weeks could save the company tens/hundreds of thousands, and she wanted it to work that well.
Google most definitely doesn't require those insane hours out of people today- hell, quite the opposite. Requesting to spend time with your family does seem ridiculous, but the thing is, if you're in a small startup that is trying to get somewhere fast? You knew what you were getting into, no one forced you into the job, and maybe you should have chosen something that allowed more family time without having to ask. That doesn't make the job bad or 'seriously wrong', it's just a different life situation.
Similarly, there are a lot of people who want to work that hard, for something they believe in or are passionate about, but they find themselves incapable. That's what the article is really for.
Well, I think that's the problem with the article--is the advice geared toward start-up employees, or current Googlers? I agree that in a start-up, you should likely expect longer weeks (even all-nighters), and maybe you do need to ask to have dinner with your family[1]. But at an established company? Seems like a cultural issue.
[1] FWIW, I still think this is insane, and would never want to do it.
I think she is merely recounting a story from the early days of Google and relating it to the larger problem of employee burnout. I know quite a few current Googlers and as far as I understand nothing so ridiculous happens there now. Of course the problem is incredibly relevant to Startups: I would never enjoy myself in such a restrictive situation unless I was working on my idea but again different people have different tolerance levels...
I think you're right, I certainly don't see much of that kind of thing around here now (there probably are some engineers pulling long hours, but they're the exceptions and it's not generally expected). Could be partly related to the location, although I haven't seen evidence of people doing 80+ hour weeks in other offices yet either.
I don't disagree, and I'm trying to criticize Mayer here--I think the "article" is a bit poorly written, and I imagine some mid-manager somewhere reading it and thinking "oh, I can make my devs works 100 hours a week, as long as I let them eat dinner with their kids once a week."
And that's okay. It isn't for everyone. Me? I managed to do 60 hours in a 3 day week last week, my first week at a new job. I loved it, and am proud of the work I did in that time. I plan on doing 60-70 hours a week consistently if I can, just because I enjoy it.
One thing that's critical here is to internalize the wisdom in "more speed, less haste." Know yourself, and find your productivity sweet spot.
For example, I am most productive when I am doing approx 6 hrs of heavy coding a day. More than that and productivity slowly drops. Less, and I could be doing more. That leaves time for meetings, management activity, etc. Most of the time I can out-produce at least three other developers together at 6 hrs/day, and I don't care how much time they put in.
That allows really 10-12 hours of work a day max, which means really no more than 90 hours of work a week assuming doing some work every day.
This really bothered me too. Maybe they just didn't phrase it well, but the sentence "Grant your employees one must-have freedom" is horrible. If you're considering freedoms something that have to be granted to you by your employer, or worse, if you're an employer who thinks that way, there's already something terribly, terribly wrong.
> If employee burnout is a regular thing inside your organization, that's a serious issue that needs solving.
Congratulations, you have discovered the entire point of the article.
> But to have to ask permission to spend time with your family is ridiculous.
I didn't see any "ask permission" going on. I saw a manager who realized this is something she has to discover from her employees, and then made sure they received it.
Even assuming she was not commuting to work (sleeping at the office), that leaves 5.4 hours a day for eating, sleeping, shitting, showering, brushing your teeth etc. Nobody can do it for more than a week or two.
There are a very few people who can, or can come close. They can make life miserable for people who work for them, merely by being an example.
In an NPR interview with the woman who wrote Why Women Can't Have It All, the woman said that Hilary Clinton limits her time in the office for precisely that reason, so that people don't stay in the office merely because Clinton is there.
It's the survivor effect: you don't interview the people who worked 130 hours/week and never got to a viable product, or burnt out before they ever did a press release.
Survivor bias. We don't get to hear of the failures. Not in the news, at least. So, even if 130 is likely to destroy anyone, a very rare breed of people who have a crazy amount of energy may pull it off. Or maybe working 130 hours a week is too much even for them, but they survive anyway because they were such geniuses to begin with (not very rational geniuses, but still).
If we had more hard data from large, non-biased samples, then we would know for sure the various effects of working 130 hours for various people. Then, we could build advice on that. (Of course I currently have reasons to think that such a study would be a waste of time, and that we just shouldn't work that much, period.)
+1, this reads more like corporate branding on how cool can early googlers be more than anything else. I'm pretty happy for her if she manages 130 hours a week, but this doesn't work for everyone... if any.
I don't really care in the debate of working your ass off or staying sane and mentally fresh to be productive, but Google pushing this fact is just plain sad.
What are we supposed to react? Just awe in admiration at the necessary self-destruction we're supposed to imitate?
Plus I was at the talk and it was sadly sadly corporate. If there is one thing I remember about Marissa Mayer is that she does the whole corporate PR / tough questions avoiding thing very well. In my mind this is what makes her so successful..
Do you think it's part of some larger corporate effort on their part?
Seems like they need to talk to the employees who posted contrary statements in this thread. They don't seem to be on-message.
> Plus I was at the talk and it was sadly sadly corporate.
Wouldn't you expect someone highly successful in a corporate environment when asked about work environment issues to give you a very successfully-minded corporate type of answer?
The surprise to me would have been if she had given an answer like, "I only work 3 hours a day, then I exercise, meditate, spend time with my family, and get a good 10 hours of sleep. That's the kind of work-life balance that everyone can have and be filthy rich like I am!"
That would have been a great deal more surprising and interesting. Sadly, reality marches on and acts all boring and serious like reality tends to do. Work hard, eat your vegetables, stay in school, don't do drugs... totally boring. :)
I don't think its a conscious decision on Google's end. They have grown, and as it becomes larger as an organization it faces different challenges. PR and communication becomes naturally very different for a large organization, it is much more scrutinized, subject to easy criticism etc. So some sort of party line attitude is necessary.
It's a thin line to walk, between honest truthfulness and too much marketing bs. I think Google is a bit too much in the latter these days, but I still have good faith in it.
Maybe it's because I'm not at a company like Google, but all articles like this seem to do two things:
1) Make everyone who doesn't put in 130 hours a week at work feel like they're not Working Hard Enough
2) Legitimize unpaid overtime/ worker exploitation
It seems that the quantity of "time spent at work" is emphasized over the quality of actual work done. I'd be curious what her work quality was over 130 hours, especially once she was in week 5-6 of working that much.
I'm pretty sure most people understand that the only people who are going to even come close to what she's talking about here are A. founders, and B. early employees with significant equity stakes. IOW, people who stand to benefit to an extreme degree, if the company succeeds. In that case, it might actually make sense to work those kind of crazy hours, since the possible payoff means financial independence and the chance to live out some of one's dreams.
Now a company that's routinely asking non-founder employees with no equity to work more than ~40 hours a week on a regular basis... yeah, that's just not necessary.
First of all, I very much doubt that she actually worked 130 hours per week with any regularity. That comes to 18.5 hours per day, including sundays. Even assuming that she could survive with 3 hours of sleep per day (yeah, sure), it leaves almost no time to eat, commute, or god, even going to the bathroom.
And why in the world is she giving advice on burnout?
I agree that this is probably a bit of an exaggeration, but probably not too far off. My brother who was a key part of mp3.com in the late 90s, was more or less working constantly for a couple of years. I lived with him for part of that time. He always got home later than me, left earlier, and rarely sat down to eat. He'd be up at all hours of the night working or checking servers, etc. He was wildly passionate about his work and was driven to make the company successful.
I can't speak for Marissa, but I certainly did pull one or two 130-hour weeks "back in the day". They _were_ productive. I did pay a huge price for them, both in terms of reduced productivity for weeks afterwards, and in terms of health. (I always get a horrible cold after exhausting myself that much)
There are two things to keep in mind:
1) These weeks were rare. I'd expect they were rare for Marissa too. You can't do that anywhere close to regularly. And you don't. Those are heroic efforts to meet a particular deadline.
2) That was "back in the day". Late 20's, early 30's. As you get older, those efforts are much harder. (Damn it, all the old people I knew needed next to no sleep. Can I please finally be old enough for that? ;)
I don't doubt that they were productive. It's just that such long hours are frequently a way to cover up lack of productivity rather than increasing your productivity.
There _are_ deadlines that are worth it. Putting in the extra hours so the decision demo to the VC guys is smoother? Uh, yes. Same goes for e.g. working on reducing network traffic before a spike will hit, if that reduction will save you a million or two.
In all cases, make sure the payout is commensurate with your effort - i.e. unless you own equity or there is a large bonus attached to that, IMHO you should tell the powers that be to go pound sand.
And putting in those hours because your manager didn't listen to your estimates in the first place? Hell no.
There _are_ deadlines that are worth it. Putting in the extra hours so the decision demo to the VC guys is smoother? Uh, yes. Same goes for e.g. working on reducing network traffic before a spike will hit, if that reduction will save you a million or two.
Yeah, definitely agree. I was more referring to employee positions without significant equity, which you touched on in the rest of your post.
Not to sound condescending, but use a little common sense here. Even people that work 40 hours a week aren't on task 100% of the time.
In a given day I'll take a couple coffee breaks, maybe go outside for a couple breaths of fresh air, and use the restroom at least twice, in addition to my lunch hour.
That said - those 40 hours that I am in the office aren't hours I am free to use however I please, so it is customary to say that you work 40 hours a week, not 35.8 hours per week, etc.
It's not hard to conceive of a situation where it just works out to be easier to be in the office every waking hour, particularly working on startups. This doesn't mean you don't stop to watch a funny youtube clip or set up a good music playlist- it just means its time fenced off from any other major commitments.
I think that its great that it worked for Marissa Mayer. But, the culture of working over 40 hours is troubling. It really puts into perspective what you should value. I value my free time too much to take that choice.
I believe that working that long isn't sustainable and I think that it puts unrealistic expectations for the average person. I would welcome your trend. Thank for the data.
> "Overwork doesn't burn people out per se, but it's doing that without knowing the things that replenish you."
If you're working 130 hours a week, and sleeping a healthy 56 hours a week, that leaves you with negative 18 hours a week for replenishing yourself. Not even including showering, eating, etc.
I'm sorry, but merely having dinner with your family on Tuesday nights is not what it takes to replenish yourself. If that's the only thing I get to ask for, it sounds like a hellish place to work.
I need hours of replenishment daily... you know, like an actual work-life balance.
For me, "replenishing" activities come in larger hour chunks, but less often than daily. I point this out to reinforce the pp and tfa, knowing your limits and what you need is vital.
So is a regular or even constant monitor of it. Lives and people change, so what worked for me last year, is not really the same as what is working for me now. If you are in a high time demand situation, it is prudent to keep up with yourself on this, so you can change when needed, and work with your employer to help ensure the best satisfaction for all.
I agree with you but some people are just not like everyone else.
Mayer is the exception to the rule. My sister, who is taking a year off to work at Google before going to law school, is of the same type so I emailed her this story.
The best that I can do is to tell that life is much more than being a lawyer. That won't make a difference though.
I think people are reaacting to the 130 hour note a bit too much. I doubt that was a common occurence, just an outlier week put in there for effect.
If what you do for work is your passion (ie: hobby, interest, etc), then you naturally get energy back from the effort you put in. Especially if you see meaningful results back. In such a situation, Mayer's recommendations makes sense.
Working for someone else's passion, idea, etc as talent/expertise doesn't translate the same. The problem with articles like this is that some manager/entreprenure/"idea guy" is going to read this and make it the rule around the office, even for the people it most certainly doesn't apply to.
I think this is probably the best interpretation of the piece. Both 1.) that passion restores (this is probably the chief reason to do what you love and not follow big trends blindly BTW), and 2.) that the 130hr was an outliner that was brought out of this piece for dramatic effect.
I'd also love to see a poll for who actually does this desk sleeping stuff. Also, how many of those fell asleep in school often? I just never get sleepy at a desk - exhausted, yes, but not sleepy...
I could see sleeping at my desk, but now for late night stuff, I would really prefer to work from home so I can sleep in my own bed. I dont see why you should have to sleep at your desk. The only reason really to be in the office is to interact with other people and unless everyone else is sleeping at their desks....
The cynic in me sees sleeping at you desk a purely showing of how far you are willing to go for no other reason.
Same with people who eat lunch, often with a work and knife, in their cubicles. It's not about saving a half hour. Maybe you can eat a sandwich and type at the same time. But really, are you saving that much time? And if you are not using your hands, can you not read your email while eating in the cafeteria?
I perceive things like that as work place theater.
Im sure the private residence at the 4 seasons in SF and the tens if not hundreds of millions she is worth had plenty to do with her not burning out as well.
Further, as others noted - that is ~18 hours per day "working" - and if by "working" we really mean, thinking about her work.
This means that she could just as easily be "working" when being chauffeured from house to work, or on the plane or eating dinner.
Its not like she needed to be welded to a screen pumping out code at her desk 18h per day... she has a much different output, mostly her thought and attention, than many others.
Hell no she wasn't. Not as Google employee #20. The implication in the article is that she was actually working in front of a screen. And while thinking is definitely "working", I don't do much thinking without at least a desk.
This reads like a allegory for Hell. How to love working 18 hours a day could almost be the title of a satire novel on the failings of modern office life. The fact that she lived it and looks back on it fondly doesn't, in my mind, reflect positively on her or her employer.
I just don't understand the hostility toward someone who has worked ridiculously hard and has achieved a demonstrable level of success. She did it, she talks about it, she's happy with the choices she made.
Why so judgmental?
Working hard at things increases your likelihood of success. Is that notion in question here at HN? True, there is a diminishing point of returns for everyone where working hard doesn't yield more returns or even produces overall negative returns... but how can you categorically decry her and her choice to push her own limits?
I worked crazy hours before I got married and have a lot of financial and experiential success to show for it. I did it then out of choice. I don't do it now out of choice. Was I doing something inherently wrong when I was younger and working so hard?
The article is poorly written. Points 1 and 2 are about knowing yourself and your own rhythm, making one think the article is about caring for one's own mental health while working long hours. Point 3, however, is about long hours being performed by one's employees.
That third point makes it sounds like the article is not about a person who has themselves worked ridiculously hard, but about someone who has cracked the whip over people working ridiculously hard, giving advice to others who want to do the same thing. Understandably, people are a lot less sympathetic to this!
My problem with it is that she's managing people and (apparently) expecting them to work similar hours like it's a perfectly normal thing to work 130 hours a week.
She's giving advice like "Grant employees one must-have freedom." Really? One whole freedom away from work?
And making statements like, "You can't have everything you want. But you can have the things that really matter to you. That empowers you to work really hard for a long period of time on something that you're passionate about." Gee, bummer, I was hoping to read a book or something, but I'm already getting to eat dinner, so I guess I can skip it.
I think it's utterly foolish for somebody to work 130 hours a week. I can't think of any good reason anybody should ever have to do that. But, if that's what they want, I'm okay with it because at the end of the day it's not any of my business. But trying to force others to do it is really not cool.
Wow - I feel heroic when I work late one day a week and my kid's events are automatically non-negotiable. Guess I shoudl be glad I'm not working at Google and still making a good living - can it last?
Clearly exaggeration on her part about her hours. No one works 130 hours a week consistently, it is just physically not possible. This article is about everything wrong with corporate work environments.
1) Productivity is equivalent to time spent in the office.
2) Pressure your employees to work more than they should - No one should ever have to "ask" to get a weekday night off to have dinner with their family.
3) Managing resentment? If you are spending your time trying to manage your resentment to your job, you probably aren't being productive because you dislike the job. Nothing spells out bad productivity like disliking what you are doing.
"I want to say, in all seriousness, that a great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by belief in the virtuousness of work, and that the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organized diminution of work."
I love Bertrand Russell. Such brilliant quotes. I especially love his thoughts on religion.
Unfortunately, he was no futurist. His view of the manual laborer doing all the work vs the bosses telling the worker what to do was hopelessly mired in the past and plagued with his thinking that the industrial revolution's growing pains were permanent or even worsening.
Given that Peter Drucker was around and writing at the same time, it's not like the idea that we were heading somewhere better as a society was unknowable.
This passage in the link you provided stood out to me:
The small surplus above bare necessaries was not left to those who produced it,
but was appropriated by warriors and priests. In times of famine there was no
surplus; the warriors and priests, however, still secured as much as at other
times, with the result that many of the workers died of hunger.
These days, our warrior/priest caste is actually the government and the elite corporatists that collude with it. Economy goes up, government spending goes up. Economy goes down, government spending goes up... strange that.
Your mistake would be in assuming that I would commit the fallacy of ad hominem, I guess.
Religion was pretty well-trodden ground in his time and his thoughts on it were really insightful. The future of the knowledge-based economic world didn't seem to be his forte. Regardless, the guy put some thought into his writings that's worth respecting and he certainly knew how to craft a phrase that would be quotable for centuries to come.
Interesting, does this essay convey to you that the manual labourer is doomed and Russell's being a pessimist? I got quite the contrary from it (advocating some sort of socialist state), on par with wilde's [the soul of man under socialism](http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/wilde-oscar/soul-m...)
Or are you referring to other writings by Russell? I have to confess that besides this essay and "proposed roads to freedom" I've read little of his own stances.
If a person can work 3x normal (40 x 3 = 120 hours, which is almost the 130 hours she claims to have worked in the past) and generate 10-1000x the value of most people, it might be a worthy tradeoff for some time.
In the long run, however, it can be hard to sustain that kind of pace.
Forget employees - this is important reading for the self-employed or work-from-homers... how do you prevent burnout when you're grinding on your own projects, or freelance work?
It might be pretty standard advice, but important to remind oneself - I'm very rarely strict with myself about taking time off or finding my 'rhythm' activities as she calls them.
>> "You can't have everything you want," Mayer cautions. "But you can have the things that really matter to you. That empowers you to work really hard for a long period of time on something that you're passionate about."
If by "everything you want" you mean "all the activities you'd like to schedule outside of business hours," then, um... yes I can. Step 1 is called "clear expectations." Step 2 is quitting when pressured to do too much. It has worked great for me.
I'm not passionate enough about any work to pull the kinds of hours she describes. Heck, even if I were -- even if the project were "build software to save your own life" -- I'd be writing some crappy code after 60+ hours.
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[ 1.6 ms ] story [ 209 ms ] threadWhen Mayer suspects an employee might burn out, she asks them to find their rhythm. They've come back with, "I need to be home for Tuesday night dinners," or "I need to be on time for my daughter's soccer games."
really bothers me. If employee burnout is a regular thing inside your organization, that's a serious issue that needs solving. But to have to ask permission to spend time with your family is ridiculous.
If you're working 130 hours a week, something is seriously, seriously wrong.
That you would only be "granted" to have time for your family if you're on the brink of burn-out is ... horrible. I'm pretty sure that's not the general guideline about how Google operates, not sure if there's some editing and/or language barrier here.
I get the feeling that the article was more written with the mind of the early days of Google- where one employee working 130 hour weeks could save the company tens/hundreds of thousands, and she wanted it to work that well.
Google most definitely doesn't require those insane hours out of people today- hell, quite the opposite. Requesting to spend time with your family does seem ridiculous, but the thing is, if you're in a small startup that is trying to get somewhere fast? You knew what you were getting into, no one forced you into the job, and maybe you should have chosen something that allowed more family time without having to ask. That doesn't make the job bad or 'seriously wrong', it's just a different life situation.
Similarly, there are a lot of people who want to work that hard, for something they believe in or are passionate about, but they find themselves incapable. That's what the article is really for.
[1] FWIW, I still think this is insane, and would never want to do it.
For example, I am most productive when I am doing approx 6 hrs of heavy coding a day. More than that and productivity slowly drops. Less, and I could be doing more. That leaves time for meetings, management activity, etc. Most of the time I can out-produce at least three other developers together at 6 hrs/day, and I don't care how much time they put in.
That allows really 10-12 hours of work a day max, which means really no more than 90 hours of work a week assuming doing some work every day.
Congratulations, you have discovered the entire point of the article.
> But to have to ask permission to spend time with your family is ridiculous.
I didn't see any "ask permission" going on. I saw a manager who realized this is something she has to discover from her employees, and then made sure they received it.
In an NPR interview with the woman who wrote Why Women Can't Have It All, the woman said that Hilary Clinton limits her time in the office for precisely that reason, so that people don't stay in the office merely because Clinton is there.
Edit: The quote is in the audio linked from here: The Impossible Juggling Act: Motherhood And Work, http://www.npr.org/2012/06/21/155498926/the-impossible-juggl...
Somehow, I think the fact she is who she is leave people with the perception that working that much is what it takes.
If we had more hard data from large, non-biased samples, then we would know for sure the various effects of working 130 hours for various people. Then, we could build advice on that. (Of course I currently have reasons to think that such a study would be a waste of time, and that we just shouldn't work that much, period.)
I know all about survivorship bias so I yearn for stories of failure.
Further she thinks that there is causation between her crazy hours and the ultimate success of Google. Correlation is not causation.
I don't really care in the debate of working your ass off or staying sane and mentally fresh to be productive, but Google pushing this fact is just plain sad.
What are we supposed to react? Just awe in admiration at the necessary self-destruction we're supposed to imitate?
Plus I was at the talk and it was sadly sadly corporate. If there is one thing I remember about Marissa Mayer is that she does the whole corporate PR / tough questions avoiding thing very well. In my mind this is what makes her so successful..
sad sad sad
Do you think it's part of some larger corporate effort on their part?
Seems like they need to talk to the employees who posted contrary statements in this thread. They don't seem to be on-message.
> Plus I was at the talk and it was sadly sadly corporate.
Wouldn't you expect someone highly successful in a corporate environment when asked about work environment issues to give you a very successfully-minded corporate type of answer?
The surprise to me would have been if she had given an answer like, "I only work 3 hours a day, then I exercise, meditate, spend time with my family, and get a good 10 hours of sleep. That's the kind of work-life balance that everyone can have and be filthy rich like I am!"
That would have been a great deal more surprising and interesting. Sadly, reality marches on and acts all boring and serious like reality tends to do. Work hard, eat your vegetables, stay in school, don't do drugs... totally boring. :)
It's a thin line to walk, between honest truthfulness and too much marketing bs. I think Google is a bit too much in the latter these days, but I still have good faith in it.
It seems that the quantity of "time spent at work" is emphasized over the quality of actual work done. I'd be curious what her work quality was over 130 hours, especially once she was in week 5-6 of working that much.
I'm pretty sure most people understand that the only people who are going to even come close to what she's talking about here are A. founders, and B. early employees with significant equity stakes. IOW, people who stand to benefit to an extreme degree, if the company succeeds. In that case, it might actually make sense to work those kind of crazy hours, since the possible payoff means financial independence and the chance to live out some of one's dreams.
Now a company that's routinely asking non-founder employees with no equity to work more than ~40 hours a week on a regular basis... yeah, that's just not necessary.
And why in the world is she giving advice on burnout?
"Marissa must be getting things done. She works here 130 hours a week!"
Yet if you look, they probably aren't actually working the entire time they're in the office.
There are two things to keep in mind:
1) These weeks were rare. I'd expect they were rare for Marissa too. You can't do that anywhere close to regularly. And you don't. Those are heroic efforts to meet a particular deadline.
2) That was "back in the day". Late 20's, early 30's. As you get older, those efforts are much harder. (Damn it, all the old people I knew needed next to no sleep. Can I please finally be old enough for that? ;)
In all cases, make sure the payout is commensurate with your effort - i.e. unless you own equity or there is a large bonus attached to that, IMHO you should tell the powers that be to go pound sand.
And putting in those hours because your manager didn't listen to your estimates in the first place? Hell no.
Yeah, definitely agree. I was more referring to employee positions without significant equity, which you touched on in the rest of your post.
In a given day I'll take a couple coffee breaks, maybe go outside for a couple breaths of fresh air, and use the restroom at least twice, in addition to my lunch hour.
That said - those 40 hours that I am in the office aren't hours I am free to use however I please, so it is customary to say that you work 40 hours a week, not 35.8 hours per week, etc.
It's not hard to conceive of a situation where it just works out to be easier to be in the office every waking hour, particularly working on startups. This doesn't mean you don't stop to watch a funny youtube clip or set up a good music playlist- it just means its time fenced off from any other major commitments.
Is it your perception that our culture is moving toward working more hours?
http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DatasetCode=ANHRS
The trend appears to be downward. Yay?
If you're working 130 hours a week, and sleeping a healthy 56 hours a week, that leaves you with negative 18 hours a week for replenishing yourself. Not even including showering, eating, etc.
I'm sorry, but merely having dinner with your family on Tuesday nights is not what it takes to replenish yourself. If that's the only thing I get to ask for, it sounds like a hellish place to work.
I need hours of replenishment daily... you know, like an actual work-life balance.
So is a regular or even constant monitor of it. Lives and people change, so what worked for me last year, is not really the same as what is working for me now. If you are in a high time demand situation, it is prudent to keep up with yourself on this, so you can change when needed, and work with your employer to help ensure the best satisfaction for all.
Mayer is the exception to the rule. My sister, who is taking a year off to work at Google before going to law school, is of the same type so I emailed her this story.
The best that I can do is to tell that life is much more than being a lawyer. That won't make a difference though.
Working for someone else's passion, idea, etc as talent/expertise doesn't translate the same. The problem with articles like this is that some manager/entreprenure/"idea guy" is going to read this and make it the rule around the office, even for the people it most certainly doesn't apply to.
I'd also love to see a poll for who actually does this desk sleeping stuff. Also, how many of those fell asleep in school often? I just never get sleepy at a desk - exhausted, yes, but not sleepy...
Same with people who eat lunch, often with a work and knife, in their cubicles. It's not about saving a half hour. Maybe you can eat a sandwich and type at the same time. But really, are you saving that much time? And if you are not using your hands, can you not read your email while eating in the cafeteria?
I perceive things like that as work place theater.
You're probably getting no more than 4-5 hours of sleep a night, if that. And you're probably pulling an all-nighter or two every week.
Further, as others noted - that is ~18 hours per day "working" - and if by "working" we really mean, thinking about her work.
This means that she could just as easily be "working" when being chauffeured from house to work, or on the plane or eating dinner.
Its not like she needed to be welded to a screen pumping out code at her desk 18h per day... she has a much different output, mostly her thought and attention, than many others.
Why so judgmental?
Working hard at things increases your likelihood of success. Is that notion in question here at HN? True, there is a diminishing point of returns for everyone where working hard doesn't yield more returns or even produces overall negative returns... but how can you categorically decry her and her choice to push her own limits?
I worked crazy hours before I got married and have a lot of financial and experiential success to show for it. I did it then out of choice. I don't do it now out of choice. Was I doing something inherently wrong when I was younger and working so hard?
That third point makes it sounds like the article is not about a person who has themselves worked ridiculously hard, but about someone who has cracked the whip over people working ridiculously hard, giving advice to others who want to do the same thing. Understandably, people are a lot less sympathetic to this!
She's giving advice like "Grant employees one must-have freedom." Really? One whole freedom away from work?
And making statements like, "You can't have everything you want. But you can have the things that really matter to you. That empowers you to work really hard for a long period of time on something that you're passionate about." Gee, bummer, I was hoping to read a book or something, but I'm already getting to eat dinner, so I guess I can skip it.
I think it's utterly foolish for somebody to work 130 hours a week. I can't think of any good reason anybody should ever have to do that. But, if that's what they want, I'm okay with it because at the end of the day it's not any of my business. But trying to force others to do it is really not cool.
Most people on HN are employees and don't want 130 hour weeks to become the norm.
This business week article has some more supporting information about the Google folks asking permission to do family events... http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-04-12/how-to-avoid...
1) Productivity is equivalent to time spent in the office. 2) Pressure your employees to work more than they should - No one should ever have to "ask" to get a weekday night off to have dinner with their family. 3) Managing resentment? If you are spending your time trying to manage your resentment to your job, you probably aren't being productive because you dislike the job. Nothing spells out bad productivity like disliking what you are doing.
"I want to say, in all seriousness, that a great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by belief in the virtuousness of work, and that the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organized diminution of work."
Unfortunately, he was no futurist. His view of the manual laborer doing all the work vs the bosses telling the worker what to do was hopelessly mired in the past and plagued with his thinking that the industrial revolution's growing pains were permanent or even worsening.
Given that Peter Drucker was around and writing at the same time, it's not like the idea that we were heading somewhere better as a society was unknowable.
This passage in the link you provided stood out to me:
These days, our warrior/priest caste is actually the government and the elite corporatists that collude with it. Economy goes up, government spending goes up. Economy goes down, government spending goes up... strange that.Religion was pretty well-trodden ground in his time and his thoughts on it were really insightful. The future of the knowledge-based economic world didn't seem to be his forte. Regardless, the guy put some thought into his writings that's worth respecting and he certainly knew how to craft a phrase that would be quotable for centuries to come.
Or are you referring to other writings by Russell? I have to confess that besides this essay and "proposed roads to freedom" I've read little of his own stances.
I work 12 hrs daily but spend around 1-2 hrs in meditation and it seems to flush out everything.
In the long run, however, it can be hard to sustain that kind of pace.
It might be pretty standard advice, but important to remind oneself - I'm very rarely strict with myself about taking time off or finding my 'rhythm' activities as she calls them.
If by "everything you want" you mean "all the activities you'd like to schedule outside of business hours," then, um... yes I can. Step 1 is called "clear expectations." Step 2 is quitting when pressured to do too much. It has worked great for me.
I'm not passionate enough about any work to pull the kinds of hours she describes. Heck, even if I were -- even if the project were "build software to save your own life" -- I'd be writing some crappy code after 60+ hours.