> Like many super-successful execs, he goes home, has dinner with his wife and kids, and then works in the late evening.
This idea that everyone is "going home at 5:30" sounds like a misnomer here, if you're heading straight home at a reasonable time only to log in remotely as soon as you're done dinner. Is this really a policy significantly different than any other given company? Or is it solely because he's a "super-successful exec" that he does extra hours?
To be very honest with you, if you are claiming you did some thing spectacular working 9 hours/day in software. You are either really a super developer or you are cheating some way.
9 hours / day is about 3 hours / day more than what has been confirmed by studies to be efficient for a knowledge worker.
So if you're working over 6 hours/day, you are most probably wasting your employer's time and your own life. Infrequent longer streches of work are a different thing, of course, they work, but they need to be countered by vacation time which brings the average to about 5-6 hours /day anyway.
>>9 hours / day is about 3 hours / day more than what has been confirmed by studies to be efficient for a knowledge worker.
May be, but nearly every successful person I know falls into two basic categories.
1. Either cheats/is-lucky, is active in corporate politics and can get job done because of being in the circle of a higher manager's yes men. Gets out of turn opportunities etc. Or in short your usual cheating.
2. Works very hard, gets stuff done. Solves problems which people want. Makes it rain and takes the rewards back home at the end of the day.
I haven't seen any exceptions to these scenarios.
You can point factory assembly era type studies, where incentives for both succeeding and failing are none. The rewards are very linear to efforts. And you get only incremental hourly income for more effort. Obviously in such cases productivity will fall with extra working hours. Because motivation falls, the person begins to associate working extra with slavery and being paid bones for slogging to make somebody else rich.
But if the reward and work relationship is non-linear. And you get good enough money for taking a risks and working real hard. The motivation peaks and corresponding work done and profit from that rise.
1. Either cheats/is-lucky, is active in corporate politics and can get job done because of being in the circle of a higher manager's yes men. Gets out of turn opportunities etc. Or in short your usual cheating.
OK, lesson time. There are people who make corporate social climbing a full-time job. Their code (if there is any) isn't great. They don't have real software accomplishments. Yet they rise. It has nothing to do with what they build, because they don't build anything. They take a lot of credit and endure (or call) a lot of meetings. That's a fundamentally different game from building software.
2. Works very hard, gets stuff done. Solves problems which people want. Makes it rain and takes the rewards back home at the end of the day.
You don't have to work 70-hour weeks to make things that people want.
Many great open-source projects were build over evenings with just 2 or 3 hours per day.
Also it depends on type of work. Most people could work on CRUD websites for 16 hours a day. But some work require laser sharp concentration and drain daily energy in half hour.
And working tired is about as smart as driving drunk. What could possibly happen? :-)
I was thinking how can anyone cheat doing their job to become better? And then I remembered the guy who outsourced his job to China so that he could look at cat pictures all day, and came to be known as his company's best expert on many technologies. :)
On serious programming, 5-6 hours seems to be an upper limit for the average. That's not to say that you can't do a 12-hour day occasionally, but you'll tire out faster and need more light weeks. To me, the best schedule seems to be 11 3-hour blocks (contiguous, no interruptions) over 5.5 days.
For startup founders it's a bit different because there's variation in workload. Code isn't the only thing they do. They also have to meet with investors, manage people, set priorities, and network. With that additional variation, you can more easily get to a 70+ hour week and not burn out because even though you're pushing yourself to the limit of what most people can handle in terms of work and stress, you're doing different kinds of work. It's still exhausting, but it's less exhausting than doing the same kind of work for 70 hours.
Look, I enjoy the hell out of programming. It is a lot of fun. And I'm good at it. I've been doing it for long enough to know that I can't get 3,500 hours per year of quality code. There are people who claim to be different, but for every case of that where I've had the "privilege" of seeing his or her work, I've found that person not to be different.
Now, I have to say this bluntly: you're just wrong on one thing. The idea that you can't have real achievements without long hours is completely incorrect. With the right insights and exposure, you can. I'm not saying it's easy, and it typically comes only after several years of continuous hard work, but what's appealing about software is that often you can save a company millions with under a hundred hours of work. (Well, actually, that's because of the thousands of hours the person spent learning before that point, but the nice thing about programming is the acceleration of value creation. Once you learn more stuff, you get to a point where you can reliably add value to such degrees.)
It boils down to one final sentence: "The Takeaway: If you create a company that encourages people to lead full lives, you can land a full roster of talent."
Or translated: treat people as... PEOPLE and you can hire people!
Are management drones really that incompetent that they need this explained to them? (rhetorical - clearly the answer is yes)
It's unfair to blame this on management drones - this propensity for mindless overwork is a key component of geek culture. We brought this upon ourselves, in many ways, though unscrupulous companies certainly have taken advantage of it.
How many other fields and subcultures glorify and celebrate caffeine-fueled binges and lack of sleep? How many subcultures form competitions around how horribly you can abuse your body for nerd points? Hell, as a nerdy kid growing up, how many of your fellow nerds shunned you for daring to branch out and do non-nerdy things on the side? For a bunch of ostracized people we sure as hell do a lot of it on our own.
This translates not just to big companies but to founders too. There is a pernicious perception that if you're not mindlessly devoted at all hours of the day (waking or otherwise) to your startup/work that you are unworthy.
The geek subculture has never really known moderation. It's sad that this article needs to exist, but bad management is really only the surface. This goes pretty deep.
We had 40-hrs work week rule from day 1 (well, nobody followed it in the beginning though). Now we have 50 people on board and it is really important to maintain a good balance to keep energy. So we have 4 working days and 1 day (Friday) dedicated to learning and personal projects. We have no overtimes for years. It is an incredibly rare event.
"[H]e goes home, has dinner with his wife and kids, and then works in the late evening."
So basically he gets a small break to have dinner and then goes back to work. That's not really what the title is suggesting. Not sure what the article is trying to suggest. Eat your veggies?
Prior to accepting the role I'm currently in I had a prerequisite that I get to finish at 4.30PM on the button every day without fear of reprisal as it enables me to spend at least an hour with my son every evening before he goes to sleep. Once he's down I usually get one or two more hours of work in before I spend quality time with my wife.
I have a lot of respect for people who work 60/70/80 hours a week however to some (myself included), quality time with my family is infinitely more valuable than anything any employer could ever offer.
I'm interested in this as well. Quite a few people I know that have flexible hours tend to split their work day one way or another: 9-5 at the office + a few hours in the evening at home, 6-9 at home in the morning + 9-3 at the office, etc. There are so many permutations, I wonder if a poll would yield anything interesting.
In my case its because traffic here in Bangalore gets too chaotic after 6. If you are leaving after 6, till 8 its foolishness. There are times when people who leave at 7 and 9 reach home at the same time. Given this, if your company has a set up where you can log in to VPN and get the work done. Rather leave at 5:30 reach home early and get the job done, than leave at 7 and spend next 2 hours just traveling.
Having said this- 'working' from home, requires a lot of discipline and being brutally honest with your own self about you productivity and impact of your work. Most importantly you need to get stuff done.
From an execs perspective, Big part of their work is designating work and sending emails. You don't need to be at office just to push Blackberry buttons.
In my experience top talent is available pretty much 24/7. Not necessarily in the office, but "always on". In order to really climb up the ladder, they incorporate work into almost every part of their lives, and most of them seem to enjoy it.
Normally multimedia adds to an article, but I thought the formatting in this story was distracting. It broke up the flow of reading, especially because the text was short and the TL;DR explanations were as long as the text itself.
I have seen this type schedules from many startup folks, and I have tried to do something similar for myself.
Now, my family consists of me, wife and two kids. As I was kept being reminded, my poor wife keeps missing out some of my time. The winners of my time are my kids as I did not spent enough quality time with her.
However, my point is to make time for your significant other. Don't ever never forget that they are also part of your family!
> I was able to get her because she was four months pregnant
I love that this is the thing that sold her on his company.
Let's be honest though, the vast majority of businesses are hard, tedious work. Not many founders are smart enough to work smart and so they just work hard. This is why pregnant women get treated as untouchables and it's not their fault, it is the business's fault for being unable to develop the right model.
The knee-jerk reaction by feminists would be to legislate this away but you are more or less asking for businesses to go out of business by hiring employees that are overpaid relative to their coworkers. Productivity cannot be provided by JUST the employee, the business needs to help as well and most do not.
I'm a believer in the 3-hour work-day. "4-hour work week" is impractical for most jobs. 40 hours is a reasonable average, but expecting anyone to put in an 8-10 hour contiguous block (that often ends up being ~11, including commute) is inhumane. Why, on the one 55-degree, sunny day in January that (by the weather's lack of concern for us) lands on a Tuesday, should people be stuck inside during that four hours of nice weather?
At least, if I were running a business, I'd plan on a 3-hour workday. First priority: get us to a point where we can survive on a 15-hour time commitment from each person. Project planning is based on that assumption. This puts slack in the schedule and reduces the slippage problem, because people working 9 hours per day in a "crunch" are pushing at 3x the planned rate, yet still working at a sustainable pace.
However, I'd only hire people who had enough interest in CS and software-- and, as importantly, whatever business I was in-- that they'd naturally fill to 40-60 (based on their ability) hours. I think people should leave the office before dark, but I'd want to hire the guy (or gal) who spends his/her stray hours thinking about and working on technology, even if I don't collect direct benefit. Think of it as "65% Time". You're not obligated for more than 15 hours per week, but you really don't fit if you aren't constantly looking to learn more.
I'd also have:
* an expectation that people eat lunch together. That's not to say you can't duck out to have lunch with a friend a few times per month, but your default behavior should be to eat with colleagues, not alone in a hurry. Definitely don't eat at your desk. (This may be my "Ah, yes" New England ancestry showing, but I really dislike eating at desks. To me, it's like eating in a car. You do it occasionally out of necessity, but you're supposed to feel bad about it.)
* 4:00 Tea, with snacks and board games. This isn't because I'm a nice guy, but because it gets people sharing ideas and encourages extra-hierarchical collaboration and mobility, and that makes both project quality and communication better. The somewhat devious thing here is that, after Tea's over (of course, it would never be called "over" because people are free to go) they'd have a lot of new ideas to try out and prove, so a lot of people would want to stay late anyway to experiment with the ideas they discussed over Tea.
I like your company website. Funny thing is, I thought the tab was on French but the copy on the page was English! Then I clicked the EN tab which looked recessed to me, and suddenly the text switched to French. Am I the only person who has ever seen it backwards like this? I'm seriously curious!
> an expectation that people eat lunch together. That's not to say you can't duck out to have lunch with a friend a few times per month, but your default behavior should be to eat with colleagues, not alone in a hurry.
Ah, yes, the "nobody ever really wants to be alone" supposition. Having lunch by myself, or at least in a non-work context, breaks the day into two "at-work" chunks, allowing me to start semi-fresh in the afternoon. Most days I need that break from other people for a while, and would certainly not want to work someplace that tried to take that respite away.
See, I would build my company so that your at-work chunks are alone.
I don't buy into this "people are best in teams" cargo-cultism that's actually an excuse to buy shitty, cheap office space. People need a little bit of social interaction, but the actual work must be done alone, preferably in a private office (I fucking hate open-plan). So, if your work time wasn't satisfying your need for privacy and being alone, then I'd be failing.
If a specific person's needs for alone time were such that the person desired to eat alone, that'd be fine. I just wouldn't want a culture where everyone eats at a desk.
Serious question: Why aren't you building a startup right now?
You have all of these theories about how a company should be run, you hate managers, you're a top .0001% programmer, etc.
It seems that being a founder is the perfect position for you.
Don't you want to validate your assumptions? If a flat, open-allocation model really is the best way to run a startup, you might be on to something huge here. You're clearly passionate about this...what's stopping you from making it happen?
Well, first of all I never claimed to be a top-0.0001% programmer. Possibly plain-old top-1% if we interpret programmer literally.
If a flat, open-allocation model really is the best way to run a startup, you might be on to something huge here.
Actually, that's a misconception. Startups tend to need a constrained open allocation: yes, everyone can work on anything important to the company, but the latter must be defined conservatively to ensure focus. As firms get larger, the open/closed allocation decision becomes more formalized and there's a clear right vs. wrong way to make that call.
I am certainly considering, for the long term, that I'll probably be starting a company at some point. It might not happen now, it may not even happen this decade, but I probably will reach a point where that's the best next step.
I think you should definitely consider doing this sooner rather than later.
From reading your comments, it looks like you make the claim that:
1. Most startups are horribly mismanaged and are run incompetently by VCs/MBAs.
2. You have a radically different strategy for running a startup that makes engineers significantly more effective.
If so, this represents a tremendous opportunity for you. A startup run on your model, if your assumptions are correct, would have a massive - possibly several orders of magnitude - competitive advantage, and could have a very meaningful impact on the business world as a whole.
At the very least, I'd be curious to see a startup bring you in for management consulting and see how they do in a few years.
Anyway, kudos for taking the long view. It's rare to see people plan things many years or decades out in our social media addled age.
If I was working for you, I'd wonder why I should put my interest in CS / software in the hands of your company. If the necessary minimum to work for a paycheck is 3 hours per day, I'd work 3 hours per day and spend the rest of my time doing my own projects at home or in a place of my choosing.
This has at least two advantages:
- I get the benefits of whatever I create (e. g. sales)
- I choose the projects that I want to work on and I never ever have to justify anything to anyone.
Your plan works only if people are as passionate about the stuff your company does as you are without having any interest in pursuing their own ideas. Developing own ideas in a company environment and outside of it are two entirely different things.
I believe employment ends up in a Nash Equilibrium. The most rational thing to do for an employee is to work the minimum amount of time required for a paycheck (and considering working overtime mostly for career advancement). For an employer, the rational thing to do is to somehow "motivate" people to work more on company-related stuff, because it makes the company more money.
To align interests, you give employees a meaningful ownership stake, or at least profit-sharing. If you hire people who are already interested in your field/industry, you make it easy for them to put their best efforts toward your shared goals.
This isn't sneaky. Some (many!) people want to work hard (and expect to be rewarded for success) but prefer to avoid taking all of the risks personally/handling the janitorial work of a business by themselves too.
Offer a good balance, and remember that regardless of what you require from your staff, they always volunteer the most important parts.
Hiring is hard, and these kinds of conditions make it even harder. But getting it right is transformative.
Some (many!) people want to work hard (and expect to be rewarded for success) but prefer to avoid taking all of the risks personally/handling the janitorial work of a business by themselves too.
Exactly. If you're older than 25 and it's no longer socially acceptable to mooch, you recognize that personal financial risk is toxic sludge to be kept out of your life if at all possible.
Why do people take it on when forming businesses? They have no other choice. Bank loans require personal liability, VCs run a reputation economy that's almost certainly illegal.
However, you can give people an environment where they can be truly "intrapreneurial" (this doesn't work in most companies for political reasons, but it can in an open-allocation environment where doing work is more important than controlling it) and participate in the upside (profit-sharing, bonuses, increasing interestingness of work) partially but don't have to take on any personal risk. People won't leave such an environment lightly.
If I ever end up calling the shots in a company (which is unlikely, because I'm +3 sigma of anti-authoritarian) I would make it a place where people would generally rather implement their ideas there (with the resources and people available) than on their own. Of course, they'd be free to do either one. But I'd try to create an open-allocation environment where people would rather go to work and build something with the great people there and capture a smaller percentage of the gross profits, than go off on their own but have to corral resources and people all over again. If I'm not providing synergy and making them more productive/effective per unit of effort than they would be on their own, then I'm failing and they have right to leave (and should).
Employment has multiple equilibria, I believe. You can invest almost nothing in employee career advancement, and then they (metaphorically) take whatever isn't nailed down. (I'm not saying they're unethical, but that they focus solely on their advancement because no one else will, and will spend 6+ hours per day on side projects or Coursera if they can. I'm the same way, so I'm ethically OK with this.) Or you can invest a lot of their careers and, yes, some of them will take what they learn from you and go off and do other things-- that's a good thing, because not everyone is built to stay at the same company for 30 years-- but the people who stay are likely to pay you back multiply.
This idea that everyone is "going home at 5:30" sounds like a misnomer here, if you're heading straight home at a reasonable time only to log in remotely as soon as you're done dinner. Is this really a policy significantly different than any other given company? Or is it solely because he's a "super-successful exec" that he does extra hours?