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Joined: Feb 2010
Posts: 2,640 Likes: 2
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OP
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Joined: Feb 2010
Posts: 2,640 Likes: 2 |
I had to laugh at the reference to 80 hour work weeks because, in my final month or two of pregnancy with DS, I worked several weeks with 100+ hours, and none less than 80. I saw this article at the Hacker News forum, created by Paul Graham of YCombinator, a successful seed fund for start-ups. Work Hard, Live Wellby Dustin Moskovitz Many people believe that weekends and the 40-hour workweek are some sort of great compromise between capitalism and hedonism, but that’s not historically accurate. They are actually the carefully considered outcome of profit-maximizing research by Henry Ford in the early part of the 20th century. He discovered that you could actually get more output out of people by having them work fewer days and fewer hours. Since then, other researchers have continued to study this phenomenon, including in more modern industries like game development.
The research is clear: beyond ~40–50 hours per week, the marginal returns from additional work decrease rapidly and quickly become negative. We have also demonstrated that though you can get more output for a few weeks during “crunch time” you still ultimately pay for it later when people inevitably need to recover. If you try to sustain crunch time for longer than that, you are merely creating the illusion of increased velocity. This is true at multiple levels of abstraction: the hours worked per week, the number of consecutive minutes of focus vs. rest time in a given session, and the amount of vacation days you take in a year. Graham himself has a different message: How to Make Wealth Economically, you can think of a startup as a way to compress your whole working life into a few years. Instead of working at a low intensity for forty years, you work as hard as you possibly can for four. This pays especially well in technology, where you earn a premium for working fast.
Here is a brief sketch of the economic proposition. If you're a good hacker in your mid twenties, you can get a job paying about $80,000 per year. So on average such a hacker must be able to do at least $80,000 worth of work per year for the company just to break even. You could probably work twice as many hours as a corporate employee, and if you focus you can probably get three times as much done in an hour. [1] You should get another multiple of two, at least, by eliminating the drag of the pointy-haired middle manager who would be your boss in a big company. Then there is one more multiple: how much smarter are you than your job description expects you to be? Suppose another multiple of three. Combine all these multipliers, and I'm claiming you could be 36 times more productive than you're expected to be in a random corporate job. [2] If a fairly good hacker is worth $80,000 a year at a big company, then a smart hacker working very hard without any corporate [...] to slow him down should be able to do work worth about $3 million a year. I wonder who is right (maybe both, to some extent). In addition to being places where gifted people should test their intellectual limits, college and graduate school may be places where they can test their intellectual stamina.
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Joined: Oct 2011
Posts: 2,856
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Joined: Oct 2011
Posts: 2,856 |
Just goes to show that, as with college, "elite" employment is for suckers. The only way to win the game is not to play. So you have no interest in working in a collaborative environment, where almost everyone is quite bright, and where employees sometimes get to work on problems that nobody knows yet how to solve? What environments do you like to work in, Dude? None, actually. They call it "work" for a reason. If it was called "fun," there wouldn't be a problem. "Work" is what I do in order to make the rest of the things I want in life to happen, happen. If work is taking up so much of my life that there's no room for anything else, then it has to go, plain and simple. The 40-hour work week is a myth, because it doesn't take into account lunch, it doesn't take into account the commute, and it doesn't take into account the time spent in off hours performing activities that prepare one to go to work. Depending on personal circumstances, the number is a lot closer to 60 than it is to 40. And then there are people like me who are on call, and who have to do work during odd, non-office hours, and the number gets even bigger. Thankfully, I have worked for employers who recognize that work isn't the most important thing in people's lives, and that if people are being asked to work overtime too frequently, that's not a YOU problem (as in, YOU need to work later, YOU need to work harder, YOU need to work faster) so much as it is a WE problem (WE need to prioritize better, WE need to allocate resources better, WE need to plan better). Oh, and I also get to work in a collaborative environment, many of my peers are quite bright, and we're working on problems that nobody is quite sure how to solve. And then I head home sharply at 5:00, where I get to actually participate in my own family, eat a healthy dinner, etc.
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Joined: Sep 2007
Posts: 3,299 Likes: 2
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Joined: Sep 2007
Posts: 3,299 Likes: 2 |
Oh, and I also get to work in a collaborative environment, many of my peers are quite bright, and we're working on problems that nobody is quite sure how to solve. And then I head home sharply at 5:00, where I get to actually participate in my own family, eat a healthy dinner, etc. Re: Mithawk, and Dude's reply. I don't recall reading some rule that the only way to solve difficult problems is to work on them for 80 hours a week. Sure, one can WORK for that long, but I'm not convinced about double-time as the best route to the SOLUTION. I suspect (as the studies Bostonian quoted imply) that the route to the solution is to be well-rested, relatively free of stress, and properly nourished as a general rule, with occasional bursts of extra hours (and concomitant increase in stress, tiredness, and/or poor nutrition) as needed. Creativity is typically a critical part of solving a difficult problem, and I believe that being tired and stressed interferes with creative (and general cognitive) ability.
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Joined: Oct 2011
Posts: 2,856
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Joined: Oct 2011
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I don't recall reading some rule that the only way to solve difficult problems is to work on them for 80 hours a week. Sure, one can WORK for that long, but I'm not convinced about double-time as the best route to the SOLUTION. Someone needs to tell those folks at Goldman Sachs and Bank of America, though, because this was recent news: http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/06/17/us-goldmansachs-interns-idUSKBN0OX1LA20150617Goldman has told its new crop of summer banking interns they should be out of the office between the hours of midnight and 7 a.m. during the week.
Goldman and other banks have taken steps over the last several years to encourage junior employees, known as analysts and associates, to take time off in a profession notorious for all-nighters and 100-hour work weeks.
The moves came after the death of a Bank of America Corp intern in London in 2013 fueled concerns over working excessive hours. It was later revealed the intern died of natural causes.
Soon after, Goldman told its junior bankers to take Saturdays off and also formed a task force to address quality of life issues.
Bank of America said at the time it would recommend junior employees take off a minimum of four weekend days per month. Note the minimal, inconsequential nature of the efforts being made by both organizations.
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Joined: Feb 2011
Posts: 5,181
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I've detected what I believe must be a typographical error. Bank of America said at the time it would recommend junior employees take off the minimum; four weekend days per month. There. That's better.
Schrödinger's cat walks into a bar. And doesn't.
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Joined: Aug 2012
Posts: 381
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Joined: Aug 2012
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I've detected what I believe must be a typographical error. Bank of America said junior employees take off the minimum; four weekend days per month, at the time it would recommend. There. That's better. One more fix, above.
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Joined: Feb 2010
Posts: 2,640 Likes: 2
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Joined: Feb 2010
Posts: 2,640 Likes: 2 |
I've detected what I believe must be a typographical error. Bank of America said at the time it would recommend junior employees take off the minimum; four weekend days per month. There. That's better. I have been in a trading environment and don't think people in sales and trading on Wall Street work that much on the weekends or late into the night -- the markets are closed. Someone who is gifted in math and interested in being a trader should understand that the cultures in investment banking and trading differ.
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Joined: Nov 2011
Posts: 282
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Joined: Nov 2011
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Re: Mithawk, and Dude's reply.
I don't recall reading some rule that the only way to solve difficult problems is to work on them for 80 hours a week. Sure, one can WORK for that long, but I'm not convinced about double-time as the best route to the SOLUTION. I suspect (as the studies Bostonian quoted imply) that the route to the solution is to be well-rested, relatively free of stress, and properly nourished as a general rule, with occasional bursts of extra hours (and concomitant increase in stress, tiredness, and/or poor nutrition) as needed. Creativity is typically a critical part of solving a difficult problem, and I believe that being tired and stressed interferes with creative (and general cognitive) ability. When someone writes a paper that 40-50 hours a work is optimal, it ignores the fact that people vary in in physical and intellectual stamina the same way they vary in IQ. Ford was interested in hiring large numbers of people on an assembly plant. The law of large numbers meant that he needed to tune his work hours for the average worker. But many times, intellectual problems can best be solved with small teams and don't scale well with many additional people. And for smaller teams you may well be able to find people who remain highly productive for considerably more than 40-50 hours a week. I could do ~60 hours a week in my younger days, but fell apart quickly with more than that. I knew people who could do more, and many people who were able to do less.
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Joined: Nov 2011
Posts: 282
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I have been in a trading environment and don't think people in sales and trading on Wall Street work that much on the weekends or late into the night -- the markets are closed. Someone who is gifted in math and interested in being a trader should understand that the cultures in investment banking and trading differ. Finance is a huge field. The hours vary as much as it does in medicine. In both industries there are a small fraction of people that work crazy hours, and many more that work 9-5 style jobs. Many traders basically work the hours the US market is open: They get in about 9AM and leave as soon as they can after 4PM. My current field, money management, has relaxed hours as well. My typical work day is anywhere from 7 - 9 hours.
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Joined: Apr 2013
Posts: 5,261 Likes: 8
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Joined: Apr 2013
Posts: 5,261 Likes: 8 |
The lifestyle calculator may be of interest when discussing elite employment and/or elite colleges.
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