In my years as an investment banker, most of the sleep deprivation that I was subjected to was the result of poor planning (mostly by other people) and a hyper-macho, superficial culture. Now as I'm trying to rebuild my health and psyche, I realize that maybe 20% of it was necessary to accomplish some important project. The rest could have been skipped without harming the financial results of the company, though my reputation would have suffered and I might have been fired long before I quit.
David, if your advocacy leads to even slightly more humane workplaces, you will deserve to be hailed as a saint by millions of people.
What goes on (that you are allow to share) in those places that requires so much time and energy? I can see building things taking a lot of effort, but is it just for theater that people put in so many hours in those places?
In investment banking, you usually work on a small team of 3-6 people. The work day is very different depending on whether your team is currently working on a deal or is between deals and pitching clients.
If your team is on a deal, then there could be honest-to-goodness work keeping your team busy for 100 hours a week. Tasks include preparing the materials used to market your client to potential investors (including financial models, presentations, and dense official offering documents), managing and attending meetings with investors or the Board, running down data requests, and diverse other things.
Most of the bullshit work comes in when a team is between deals. During this period, the senior members spend a lot of time working their connections at potential clients while the junior members prepare "pitches" - presentations designed to convince a company to do a deal. Junior employees are expected to be at the office when their superiors arrive and stay at the office when their superiors leave. When I was working, I might start a typical day by finishing up a request from the day before, then have absolutely nothing to do for 4 or 5 hours, and then receive and turn around assignments from sometime in the afternoon until the evening. The boss would make his last calls around 7PM, which is when I would get my last batch of work for the day. I would work on that for anywhere between one to thirteen hours and then head home (or not, if it was 13 hours).
The culture at an investment bank is very unforgiving. An employee must be a competent worker to survive, but he must also be sure to keep up appearances. Half of an employee's pay is paid in an annual bonus, which is determined by a mixture of objective and subjective factors. It is not enough to be a good worker, an employee must also make sure he looks like a good worker - which entails being seen in the office a lot. The time of a junior employee is not considered valuable, since they are well overpaid compared to their peers their bosses feel like they should be willing to take unlimited shit without bitching. Managing Directors think nothing of asking an Analyst to do something on Sunday when it pops into their minds, even if the work could easily wait until Monday morning. An MD will also have no qualms about asking an Analyst to start on something at 7PM when he could have told him about it hours earlier. You have never seen so many bitter 23 year-olds as you can find at an I-Banking office.
In exchange for most of your life, an entry-level employee is usually compensated well for someone just out of college. I'd estimate the mean analyst on the street earns $120K in an average year. I wasn't on the street, but I'm not working right now thanks to my savings from my days as an I-Banker. If I could do it again, I probably wouldn't. I like where I am but those were a bleak, desolate 2 years and the angina hasn't completely faded away yet.
It is what it is. It is cool to work with hard-nosed, business-minded, sharp people. I enjoyed sitting in on meetings between Private Equity funds and the executives of the companies we were trying to raise money for. I learned the function of all the players in the financial market and I got to stay in nice New York hotels on someone else's dime. I made good money. But it wasn't for me, so it was slowly wearing away my health and sanity.
Doing a startup seems to me more like playing soccer than running a marathon. Though you need to pace yourself, there are moments when you want to work super hard. So while being out of breath is not a sufficient condition for winning, it probably is a necessary one.
Likewise for startups. Sleep deprivation is not a sufficient condition for winning, but empirically it seems to be a necessary one. Not long-term, obviously, but during certain peak times. Even at YC there are times when we have to work so hard that we sleep less. On interview weekends, for example.
So the reason people who work hard (not just in startups, but in all fields) treat sleep deprivation as a badge of honor is that it's a sign that one has the necessary commitment not to cave when there are spikes of work.
"Sleep deprivation is not a sufficient condition for winning, but empirically it seems to be a necessary one."
It doesn't seem to be a necessary one either, given the existence of counterexamples. Eg. Pierre Omidyar started E-bay while keeping his day job and adamantly refused to work more than 8 hours/day on it even after going full-time. One of the reasons he stepped back from a management position was that he didn't culturally fit in with E-bay after hiring a few work-through-the-night cowboy coders.
Not everyone in a startup has to work hard, so long as some people do. But someone had to be carrying a pager when the servers went down, or eBay wouldn't still exist.
Being on call out of hours isn't the same as working (too) hard. 40-hour week, plus being paged a few times a month to deal with 4am crises, is perfectly reasonable. So is pulling the occasional all-nighter to meet a deadline.
The article is talking about something completely different: putting yourself in a state of constant sleep-deprivation through working ridiculous hours. And the author is right: that's not half as effective as people claim.
I don't believe the "out of breath" analogy quite holds, because being sleep deprived is not working at your brain's full potential, whereas running flat out probably is working at your lung's full potential.
A better analogy might be playing while hurt. You're clearly not at your full potential, but you are making progress.
But I'd argue that I'd rather have people on my team that aren't hurt: it is detrimental to performance in a similar way and acknowledges the commitment.
You're misunderstanding the metaphor. Working while tired is working at your full potential measured in what you can do in n hours (which is the case you usually face in a startup), not in what you can do per hour (which rarely matters).
Actually, that's how I interpreted it, but I appreciate the clarification.
But I still disagree. Anecdotally, I've found that coding for 6 hours a days gets more features implemented and bugs fixed than coding for 14 hours a day.
The loss of mental acuity, clarity and creativity (again, this is for me, and anecdotal) is simply too high a price to pay.
Anecdotally, I've found that coding for 6 hours a days gets more features implemented and bugs fixed than coding for 14 hours a day.
Sure, in the long term. But when you have a big demo or a customer deadline coming up in 2 days, or a server crashing right now, it often pays to keep working past 6 hours.
But the playing while injured metaphor has some parallels as well. Not only is this a badge of honor, but it's flatly expected of you once you get past a certain level of competition. This is generally good and right.
However, past a certain level of injury, you're hurting both yourself and the team, and you're better off taking time to heal.
My personal experience with sleep deprivation is that if I go too long and too hard, I am doing less work than if I had rested, even in absolute (and not per hour) terms. And DHH is 100% correct that as most people get tired, their solutions to problems get worse -- that's definitely true for me.
I've tried various levels of sleep over the years, from a solid 8 hours a night to so little sleep that I would literally hallucinate during the day. For me, except in short (2-3 day) bursts, at least 6-7 hours of sleep a night is most effective for my ongoing productivity. Any less than that, and I would have gotten more done net if I had slept.
Having said that, everyone is different, and if you're one of those people who can get 2 hours of sleep on an ongoing basis and still be highly productive, then cool.
I'm not so sure about this. Working long hours for a small period doesn't seem to me like it would change your progress by an order of magnitude. If you build something great, does it really matter whether it takes a few extra days?
It depends on the kind of work. I think there's a distinction between creative work and the more mundane stuff, and any role worth doing has both aspects. I think people only have a few hours of high quality creative work in them a day. But the reality is that most important work has a much larger drudgery component and working longer hours for that most definitely does scale linearly. Fixing bugs or pouring through financial data for inconsistencies is probably going to take you X number of hours no matter how many days you spread it over. In fact, you're probably going to be more efficient doing it in some marathon sessions.
I'm pretty sure I agree. Certain problems require too much headstate to solve in smaller time quanta, and that at a certain point, when I'm bleary eyed, I lose enough caution to think daring thoughts.
Part of it's just the adrenaline, too. And if you have friends goading you on, an allnighter can be pretty fun.
Depends how you manage it. When I do this, I go to sleep mid-afternoon the next day, and sleep for 12+ hours. When I wake up after that (early morning), I feel absolutely fantastic.
The end result is probably only about 20-25 hours work in two days - i.e. not much more than normal working days. The advantage isn't in the total hours, it's in having the same problems rattling around in your head for a long time.
This might be better titled "Chronic sleep deprivation is not a badge of honor", but the point is well-made. Being sleep-deprived is like being drunk: you're not competent to realize how incompetent you've become.
>This might be better titled "Chronic sleep deprivation is not a badge of honor"
The original title is better. It makes perfect sense. It expresses the same meaning. He is clearly referring to the phenomenon of sleep deprivation and not to a single instance. It's clear from the title, and the article even explicitly points this out.
He isn't writing legalese. He doesn't have to gird every sentence against being taken out of context and nitpicked. To do so would be bad English (as your example demonstrates).
I know we live in a fast food, sound bite time. I know we expect headlines to be clear and to the point. His is. And it uses better language.
The last thirty years have placed a tremendous strain on the language. We have lots more to talk about and not many more words to do it with. The solution isn't to pile on more and more qualifiers. You can never attain absolute precision. The solution is to realize that as the number of things we have to talk about increases, the expressiveness of the language expands to account for them.
You can't fit everything into a sound bite. If it's worth talking about, it's worth explaining at length. And if it's worth explaining at length, you might as well use good English.
Please tone it down. I made a suggestion for adding one word to the title, and said it might be better. That is a flimsy pretext for such a vitriolic response.
The first sentence wasn't even my main point; the second sentence was. You write, "He doesn't have to gird every sentence against being taken out of context and nitpicked." Extend me the same courtesy.
Good article... and it reminds me of the messes that I've had to clean up at various jobs; in every case, the people who were working the insanely long hours weren't getting as much done as I was, and since I was getting my work done, I had to clean up their messes. The people working the 80+ hour work weeks typically ended up causing more harm than good, and also typically got more rewards and respect from the management because of their "dedication" to the job.
Never mind that most of the code they wrote didn't work until someone else fixed it.
The 'badge of honor' concept rang true for me while working the videogame industry - The crunch period was often times discussed with great pride, 'Man, I was up for two straight days fixing the item bug!'
The ironic thing was that more bugs were being introduced during this period than the 'regular' development period (We measured it during one of my last projects).
Our conclusion was that we'll work as hard as it takes, but sleep was necessary - We mandated that everyone get rest after 10 hours at the office (on the couch, under the desk, or at home). Though since I left, they went back to their old ways.
This is why I wish more software jobs had flexible hours. The vast majority of programmers have absolutely no need to be in their office at some predefined hour. So if you had to work late one night, it'd be nice to be able to sleep some of it off the next day. But no... Megacorp wants you in your chair by 8.
And as a night owl, I can not fall asleep before 2-3ish am, but I have to be at work by 8 or 8:30, so I'm constantly working with some sleep deprivation.
Personally I am super productive from about 9pm to 2-3am.
But I need to be at the client at a reasonable hour (9am-9:30am).
Lately I've taken to hacking away from about 9pm to midnight then going to bed so that I can keep everyone happy. Of course, I tend to toss and turn a bit because there is always something that my mind is chewing on that I left off at midnight.
Weekends, all bets are off and my sleep schedule gets totally messed up with late nights and early mornings (2 year old kid). Ugh, I am not 18 any more :)
I try to never do super mind-heavy work late at night because I dream in whatever that was alllll night long. When I did have to do marathon code sessions all day and late into the night, I did yoga to flush my brain of coding. It helped a lot and I slept like a baby.
Exercising a lot helps me fall asleep better at night. Lately i've been too busy with work to get much in, and i'm having a hell of a time falling asleep. When I train for something (some sort of race) I sleep like a baby.
I can second this whole-heartedly. Especially the point about motivation. I find the lack of sleep really kills my willpower and I end up being really unable to do anything that doesn't interest me.
So trying to extract 110% performance from today when it
means having only 70% performance available tomorrow is a
bad deal. You end up with just 77% of your available peak.
Uh, not quite: x(1.1) + x(0.7) != 0.77(2x). Reminds me of the fuzzy math in DHH's startup revenue calculations...
I think it might be more accurate to say work per day = (x(1.1) + N * x(1.1 * .7))/(n+1) = x(1.1 + n * .77) / (n+1)
So as your number of days approaches infinity average work / day approaches 77% of your old work per day. Or on your second day you only get 77% of your normal work day done.
It might not be a badge of honor, but it is often the best thing to do in the short term. This isn't even new to startups. My grandfather was looking for work in the middle of the Depression, and got a 2-day 'feel-you-out' kind of assignment at a gold mine. So he worked 48 hours at a shot, and got the job.
Depriving yourself of sleep for long periods of time is obviously not good. But pulling a couple of all-nighters a week when needed is pretty necessary if you want to get anywhere IMHO.
I think it's the "when needed" part that is the real problem. Most startups use being a startup as an excuse to justify a perpetual crunch mode to make up for poor planning.
All three of the startups I worked for over the years tried that, and none of them have gone anywhere significant. All of them ended up laying off a lot of people.
(For once) I agree with 37 Signals. I'll go ya one further: if you plan well, there is no need to chronically work 12+ hour days. Really.
In pre-dot-bomb startups, we used to work like that -- mainly because we were writing tools and infrastructure that now exists in generic form. For free. On the inter-webs.
David, if your advocacy leads to even slightly more humane workplaces, you will deserve to be hailed as a saint by millions of people.