<rant>
What a bunch of B.S. In fact I cannot believe it is even here in Hacker News.
"Any time you have worked long hours, it is a sign of a broken process."
This is a such a horrible generalization. Successful people always work hard/long hours to make something succeed. Imagine telling your kids that to be successful you should work just 40 hours and no more. They will be easily steamed rolled by other kids that are willing to work harder/ go the extra mile.
>>Now for the matter of drive. You observe that most great scientists have tremendous drive. I worked for ten years with John Tukey at Bell Labs. He had tremendous drive. One day about three or four years after I joined, I discovered that John Tukey was slightly younger than I was. John was a genius and I clearly was not. Well I went storming into Bode's office and said, ``How can anybody my age know as much as John Tukey does?'' He leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head, grinned slightly, and said, ``You would be surprised Hamming, how much you would know if you worked as hard as he did that many years.'' I simply slunk out of the office!<<
>>What Bode was saying was this: ``Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest.'' Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works ten percent more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity - it is very much like compound interest. I don't want to give you a rate, but it is a very high rate. Given two people with exactly the same ability, the one person who manages day in and day out to get in one more hour of thinking will be tremendously more productive over a lifetime. I took Bode's remark to heart; I spent a good deal more of my time for some years trying to work a bit harder and I found, in fact, I could get more work done. I don't like to say it in front of my wife, but I did sort of neglect her sometimes; I needed to study. You have to neglect things if you intend to get what you want done. There's no question about this.<<
Yes, sometimes it may mean that working long hours there is something wrong and the title should reflect that rather than just generalizing.
I remember there was a study done at one point that the best piano players had worked longer hours per week practicing as opposed to the so so piano player.
You want to work 40 hours and be happy? Good! But I doubt you will be able to achieve greatness like that. Achieving success requires sacrifices.
Edison is another example of a guy that would work really long hours. Look at everything that he accomplished. You want to be mediocre, work 40 hours. You want to be great like Edison, work your ass off. Don't listen to the little people that tell you not to work your ass off. That is the road to mediocrity.
Now, if you are saying that you want to have time for family and be another cog in the machine, 40 hours are great for you.
</rant>
edit - OK, after further reflection I think that what the title means is that IF you are just a cog in the machine of a large corporation AND you are working long hours then something is terribly wrong. If that was the original intent then I completely agree. Is OK to do it once in a while but if it is normal then something is terribly wrong.
Now, for academics, athletics, other competitive fields and even startups at least in their earlier faces you still have to work long hours or the other guys will steam roll you. Eventually though you do hit a point of diminishing returns so you have to watch for that.
So you take a few edge cases and make them the example for the main stream?
I doubt you should ever use Edison or Einstein to ever refer to the average person. Let alone put yourself in the same camp, you'll probably do yourself mental harm via exhaustion. Fine if you have abnormal drive and intelligence go for it.
But chances are you are an average person and need to obey the rules of what makes average people happy. Or you won't be happy. Maybe you'll throw yourself at your work in the hope of finding happiness.. something I'll admit to doing myself.. chasing dreams of a better life.
Theres plenty of research that states the exact opposite of what you are saying, enough that France even had laws banning working over 35 hours (and its 48 hours for the rest of Europe). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time#Western_Europe
What works for some people doesn't work for others. I remember listening to my friend talk about working in Japan during the late 80's early 90's and described the people he worked with as having an ingrained apathy towards the long work day, and most just mucked around all day. Took 2 hours to even start work, the work force was extremely unproductive for the hours they where doing. I'm sure theres different stories in different industries but thats a story I take as 100% as the person isn't known for being a liar or exaggerator.
Just because you can make people work long hours doesn't mean things get better, it often means things get worse. And thats the moral of his story about Japan.
The stories of how industrious and loyal they are... just stories... they are just people like everyone else. And as a majority they'd rather be at home with there families and friends than at work making someone else rich.
I'm in Japan now and Japan is still like this. Actually, a lot of SE Asia is like this - Korea, HK. When I talk to people about this they even admit it. They realise they are goofing off a lot of the day because they know they have to stay late so there is little incentive to be productive.
I believe that people can only work productively for a set amount per day and keeping people at work after that doesn't lead to any more work being done.
In general what you are saying is true, but its not the general public your must fear in the competition.
Its always the exceptional guy who is going to win the prize any day. And that is why people always run into exceptionally productive people and don't find it easy to compete with them. Multiply this with the drive and energy which keeps them productive over time and suddenly things get very difficult.
For most people 5 hours of productive work will see them by, but you should not expect that to be sufficient to be the best or to be sufficient enough to beat the best. For that you will have to do something extra.
>>So you take a few edge cases and make them the example for the main stream?
I could show you many more but why?
>>But chances are you are an average person and need to obey the rules of what makes average people happy
Yes, do what makes you happy and yes I am an average person but that doesn't mean that I cannot tell you that the sky is blue even if I were blind (I think you know what I mean). What I disliked is the blanket statement. In very competitive fields if you want to be top dog you have to work long hours and even that may not be enough. Of course, if you work on a sweatshop working long hours really makes no difference. Top dog against who? Lets just not make blanket statements.
Some people are happy working 40 hours others are happy working 80 hours. And if you are in a competitive field 40 hours will not do the job. Happiness is besides the point. If that doesn't make you happy don't do it. I'm not telling anybody to work 80 hours to be happy. I'm telling you not to try to convince other people that they should not work 80 hours a week because you don't like to work 80 hours a week.
I'm saying that if you want to stay ahead of your peers, say, athletics, academics, you better train more, study harder than the other guy. Is almost a self evident truth so I don't understand what we are arguing about. If I'm wrong please enlighten me.
But as a matter for fact we need to define the term 'Happiness', a lot of people measure happiness by how much minimum they can achieve(Which makes them happy) with how much minimum effort they put. For example, if you put in 5 productive hours of work a day and end up achieving a, what you describe as a happy life, you would consider that success.
But a lot of people tend to measure success in a different way. For example, Even though during atleast two days in a week I might have opportunity to go back early. I purposefully use the free time to check if I can do some extra work which will give an edge to my career. Generally its something like this, I check if I can add some feature that has a direct impact on revenue or some bug that I can fix or something I can read upon which will help me take more informed decisions later.
I was not a very brilliant kid in the school, nor in college nor during my engineering. In fact I was almost on border, but I would always make it. How? By multiplying effort over time. Most of my friends back in school when I meet them today, find it astonishing that I have made it so big in the industry, while even many high scoring folks haven't.
At work my philosophy is very simple, Seize every work opportunity as it comes. Ensure you multiply effort with time. Thereby, completely hedging for my low IQ by sheer work alone. Indeed as they say opportunity multiplies as you seize it. I also see a lot of high scoring people straight out of college who don't do it big in the industry. Because intelligent people expect, brilliance will make up for everything. But the fact is, Intelligence only acts as a catalyst in the path to success. The bulk of everything else is sheer hard work.
Apart from this its important to understand things like management. Especially time management. Its important to plan, review and track your life time, decade, yearly , monthly and weekly goals. Measuring your productivity is important. Reviewing it constantly, and course correction is the key.
The great thing is today you can achieve anything by sheer work. This gives me great hope for the future.
We're mixing things here a bit. Theres always merit in pushing and improving yourself, but the article was about putting in extra hours for other people, and the linked response was about over time being linked to bad process and decisions.
And hence in a sense chasing someone else's dream and not so much your own, and even worse putter a wager on the return of that extra effort.
Accomplishment is nice, but there's a lot more to it than simply working hours. A consistent thing: long hours without consideration of whether you could do even better with a change in process are always a mistake.
If you're doing the work in a situation where adding staff or changing commitments really will not help you, by all means, continue to work, and find whatever tricks you need to stay focused in that time.
Edison had a whole company helping him do his work, and I bet the best of piano players have a cleaning lady, a chauffeur, and a specialist in tuning pianos all helping them to spend more time mentally preparing (including via sleep) and with hands on keys.
If yo want to work 9 to 5 that is fine. Is your choice. But I think is unfair to claim that working 9 to 5 will increase your chances of success. Now, whether you don't care for that is another matter. Fine with me if you are happy. Working long hours in a sweat shop is bad obviously. Working long hours practicing in athletics, music, academics is necessary. If you don't do it somebody else will. Assuming you want to reach the top else why even discuss it.
No long hours are not necessary. The study written about in this thread - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2900301 - is about how the best violin players only practice for 4 hours per day but the good players actually practice more.
The link claims that one of the best violinists in the world would practice 7 hours a day. The complete opposite of what you are citing.
From the link:
>>Such dedication is also apparent in musicians. Maxim Vengerov, 34, is one of the world’s greatest violinists. He was born in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk and, after being given a miniature fiddle at the age of four, displayed outstanding aptitude.
His talent was matched by an immense work ethic. He practised seven hours a day, giving his first recital at the age of five and winning his first international prize at 15. Vengerov said: “My mother would get home at 8pm, cook dinner and then teach me the violin until four in the morning. As a four-year-old boy it was torture. But I became a violinist within two years.”
<<
Also, different professions probably have different definitions of long hours. Four hours practicing on the violin must be pretty exhausting since it is a physical exercise. Therefore you must also take that into account. Four hours playing the violin and four hours programming are not the same thing. Four hours for a violin player is already long hours. Four hours for a programmer sitting in front of a computer is nothing. Specially if you are debugging code, you could easily spend more than 24 hours debugging a problem, I doubt a violinist could do the same.
Another example is marathon runners. Running two hours everyday is already long hours. You cannot equate two hours running a marathon with two hours of programming right.
So my point still stands, you have to put in long hours. The definition of long hours changes by profession.
An easier way to see it is that you have to put in more hours than what your average peer puts in. Of course, you also have to do it smart.
-Edit
This is a tangent but I just thought of this and seems important enough to share. Even though the runner and the violinists are practicing they are not really being productive because they are not producing anything that the world can use. A programmer in the same amount of time is being productive because he is actually generating things that can be used by the world.
Interestingly I never found playing the cello exhausting - well, very occasionally if I had been playing a lot (several days running of a couple of hours practise, many hours rehearsing, couple of hours performing). On the other side, singing could be very tiring (though again, all-day sessions, always standing up).
Edison was famous for bragging that he only needed 2-3 hours sleep a night. Then when Tesla came to work with him he once remarked to a reporter "Yes, he only sleeps 2-3 hours a night but he naps for 5-6 hours during the day."
Edison Vs Tesla debates often end up going no where, this is because the debates take the nature of debate between two school of thoughts. One which believes that learning the body of knowledge and using proper academic approach to research is the right way to success(Tesla), other approach is to take a interesting problem without having no background and prior knowledge of what you are going into, but as you go deeper you begin learn and do things by experimenting on the way(Edison).
Edison approach takes time, a lot of work and thereby you need to find ways of being more productive. Both methods have their plus'es and minus'es.
But.. If you find some body very hardworking, going over the counter to put effort in his work to achieve something and he ends up being more successfully than everybody else. That shouldn't look surprising. And that precisely what happened with Edison and Tesla.
Although Edison lost the war of currents, but comparing their lives as a whole Edison ended up achieving far more than Tesla.
"Any time you have worked long hours, it is a sign of a broken process."
This is a such a horrible generalization. Successful people always work hard/long hours to make something succeed. Imagine telling your kids that to be successful you should work just 40 hours and no more. They will be easily steamed rolled by other kids that are willing to work harder/ go the extra mile.
Here is a relevant piece from: http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html
>>Now for the matter of drive. You observe that most great scientists have tremendous drive. I worked for ten years with John Tukey at Bell Labs. He had tremendous drive. One day about three or four years after I joined, I discovered that John Tukey was slightly younger than I was. John was a genius and I clearly was not. Well I went storming into Bode's office and said, ``How can anybody my age know as much as John Tukey does?'' He leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head, grinned slightly, and said, ``You would be surprised Hamming, how much you would know if you worked as hard as he did that many years.'' I simply slunk out of the office!<<
>>What Bode was saying was this: ``Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest.'' Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works ten percent more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity - it is very much like compound interest. I don't want to give you a rate, but it is a very high rate. Given two people with exactly the same ability, the one person who manages day in and day out to get in one more hour of thinking will be tremendously more productive over a lifetime. I took Bode's remark to heart; I spent a good deal more of my time for some years trying to work a bit harder and I found, in fact, I could get more work done. I don't like to say it in front of my wife, but I did sort of neglect her sometimes; I needed to study. You have to neglect things if you intend to get what you want done. There's no question about this.<<
Yes, sometimes it may mean that working long hours there is something wrong and the title should reflect that rather than just generalizing.
I remember there was a study done at one point that the best piano players had worked longer hours per week practicing as opposed to the so so piano player.
You want to work 40 hours and be happy? Good! But I doubt you will be able to achieve greatness like that. Achieving success requires sacrifices.
Edison is another example of a guy that would work really long hours. Look at everything that he accomplished. You want to be mediocre, work 40 hours. You want to be great like Edison, work your ass off. Don't listen to the little people that tell you not to work your ass off. That is the road to mediocrity.
Now, if you are saying that you want to have time for family and be another cog in the machine, 40 hours are great for you. </rant>
edit - OK, after further reflection I think that what the title means is that IF you are just a cog in the machine of a large corporation AND you are working long hours then something is terribly wrong. If that was the original intent then I completely agree. Is OK to do it once in a while but if it is normal then something is terribly wrong.
Now, for academics, athletics, other competitive fields and even startups at least in their earlier faces you still have to work long hours or the other guys will steam roll you. Eventually though you do hit a point of diminishing returns so you have to watch for that.