> If you only have seven good hours a day in you, does that mean the rest of the day that you spend with your family, reading, exercising at the gym, or whatever other virtuous activity you would be spending your time on, are all done poorly?
If I do focused mental work for even seven hours I'm completely wiped. I absolutely can't read a normal book at that point. Clicking the next meme on reddit is about all I can manage. And yeah, my wife and kids aren't getting a lot from me on those days.
I'm surprised that Carmack seems to find this absurd. Am I super atypical? Or is he? I'm actually curious: after let's say 5 hours of in-person interviews, do most people come home and fire up the CAD software to work on rockets or whatever, like Carmack, or do they hang out on the couch vegetating and feeling like they have a minor hangover or head cold, like me?
I think a huge part comes down to if you are actually interested in what you are working on. I can pretty easily do 16+ hour days if I'm doing something I enjoy, whether that's writing code or playing videos games when I was a kid.
Another huge factor is being able to avoid external stressors which are what really drain people and cause burnout I think, having bad co-workers or manager, health issues, family issues, etc. is a killer and will impact your focus drastically. Big difference between working long hours because you are having fun versus working long hours because a boss is breathing down your neck and you'll be fired if you don't finish something in a few weeks
Carmack is also in a favorable position where he's basically always been able to choose only projects he's passionate about for work, so he can't really see the perspective of somebody being forced to work on something pointless by their boss
my take from his comment was that even when you are too mentally drained to write code or something similarly demanding, you could still do stuff like meetings, responding to emails, getting feedback from customers, planning stuff you will code when mentally fresh, etc. So the critical thing is to make sure you can focus on valuable stuff when you are at your best and try to save the other stuff for later
> Carmack is also in a favorable position where he's basically always been able to choose only projects he's passionate about for work, so he can't really see the perspective of somebody being forced to work on something pointless by their boss
BUT HE SHOULD!
One of his first jobs was a soul crushing dev work when they had to write X random PC utilities every Y week for some monthly subscription thingy. You know what he did? He started slacking like crazy at work so he could work on game development with his bodies at home. Using company equipment he more or less stole from work.
(I think he was sued for this, and then repeated it many years later and was sued by Facebook)
So technically, he worked shorter hours. He just didn't tell his boss.
In this context it sounds like hes a hypocrite. Hes the boss now so hes pushing overwork as s virtue. I wonder how would he like having current self for a boss in those PC utility companies.
So, the huge factor you're talking about is stress. Another factor is multi-tasking. Each are multipliers in draining energy.
I can work 16 hour days also, but I'm still dealing with a good portion of that at a seriously degraded mental state. At the end, I'll be making the dumbest mistakes, and it's questionable if that time is even useful.
Athletes do it best I think. They have their cycles of sport, training and recovery. They know their limits. They know their optimum.
They (top athletes) are also often physically devastated at age 40 and suffer from chronic issues for the rest of their lives. The incentives for top athletes are not conducive to a healthy life at all.
This is common knowledge. Both retired pro soccer and handball players in my scandinavian countries almost all have a myriad of issues, most commonly and serious knee issues that require many operations.
I know several pro swimmers though and haven't heard of any serious issues there, so i guess it's from the impacts and constant running.
Heck, I'm Brazilian and it feels like 50% of males I know developed knee problem in their late 30s/early 40s
Almost all of them were weekend football (court, not grass) players. The others were week day players as well
Me, like the good nerd, I am developed back problems instead
I worked with a guy who played college football and had aspirations for the NFL, he was a wreck and always complaining about the lingering effects of injuries from his days playing. I guess this is somewhat expected with a contact sport, but I've also seen guys I knew who did a lot of high intensity training and after about 10 years or so seem to start aging more quickly compared to their non-athletic siblings.
I mean getting exercise is definitely good for you and in a choice between too much and too little I think you're better off overdoing it, but just constantly burning your metabolism at full steam seems to age you faster, couple that with the impact caloric deficit is supposed to have on aging and at least in my mind there's a pretty clear connection between the two.
As someone who did competitive weightlifting early in my life I don't think it's true.
First of all, a healthy body is very good at adaptation, i.e. if properly trained, your bones, muscles and other tissues get thicker and less prone to tearing, breakage etc.
Second, you will be surprised at how much pressure could daily activities put on your tissues, e.g. your vertabrae disks get higher pressure when you are wobbly sitting than standing even with some additional load. And in my experience people who train their body for extreme conditions have less problems in their elderly than people who never trained much at all.
And as you've noticed, most sportspeople have troubles with their serious traumas, not due to routine trainings. Plus of course this traumatization level varies from sport to sport.
In this friends case it was the NFL part that caused the damage. Not the fitness part.
I once did a boxing class. The day we did drills with with those boxing pads that require 2 hands to hold up, my head was throbbing for the rest of the day. Tried it again and same thing. Then I quit. Clearly I cannot take a serious punch.
Well, they tend to be bigger than other fit people (NFL players excepted), and they do a lot of jumping, which if all goes well is followed by landing.
Some people enjoy multi tasking. For them, focus = boredom = frustration. That’s me. If you give me 7 hours per day on the same focused task, I’ll burn out just like you described for the opposite.
Please stop projecting your ideal work life onto other people.
Mental preferences are endlessly complex. It’s not ok to assume everyone has your preference and can work the same hours and way you do. It’s also not ok to project that towards some work / life balance that assumes things outside work are primary drivers in everyone’s lives.
Some people derive their main satisfaction in life from the fruit of their work. That’s ok too.
Maybe I'm in the same atypical group as Carmack (a sentence I never thought I'd utter) but during a normal work week, my idea of relaxing is things like studying statistics, product development, numerical methods to solve differential equations, history, etc.
This is stuff most people would call "work" because it does take effort, it makes me a better developer and much of it ties somewhat directly into problems I'm facing at work. But for me it's winding down after work, and recharging for the next day.
Sometimes I have so much to do at work that I need to just read fiction or play around in the darkroom to relax. But this is not the norm -- it's happened twice in the last decade, and lasted for about a month.
So for the question of how many days I can do it? On average 1795.
>Sometimes I have so much to do at work that I need to just read fiction or play around in the darkroom to relax. But this is not the norm -- it's happened twice in the last decade, and lasted for about a month.
Ok but you're literally describing a burnout cycle. Some people would prefer to just skip that part and have a completely sustainable working pace.
No. Having so much to do at work for a brief period that I choose not to take on extra work is not burnout. Calling it that would insult every person suffering from actual burnout.
Out of curiosity, how would you rate on a scale of 1%-100% the extent to which your professional work aligns with what you want to do professionally later in your career?
Great question. Considering all possible lines of work, maybe 99.5 %? But that's a little like saying I share 98 % of my DNA with chimpanzees -- maybe those last 2 % are the parts of interest.
Considering just the general area of IT, maybe 80 %? I get to do product development which is my interest, but there are also many things which I would like to be different, like purpose of product, organisational size, leadership philosophies, etc.
I'm curious to hear about people who have found themselves in such a great place professionally.
I can work all waking hours on passion projects (including the boring grind - not just the infatuation and ideation phase) as long as it's self directed. Finding work opportunities that aren't orthogonal to long term areas of interest and don't feel like accumulating useless experience and constructing a parallel career is hard.
I can easily work my day job, go to the gym and give it my best, and then come back home and fire up my own project if I’m generally feeling happy.
If I’m stressed it can lead to some other mental health issues and then even my day job is effected.
I think anyone can do this if they were allowed to structure their work the way they want and work on the things they want to. Then we’d all be Carmacks in our chosen field. But we aren’t all so lucky.
> I can pretty easily do 16+ hour days if I'm doing something I enjoy, whether that's writing code or playing videos games when I was a kid.
I'm a coder by trade, but I've never really spent lots of personal time coding, like most of the really good coders I know. That's just not fun for me.
On the other hand, I do sometimes spend many personal hours making spreadsheets for fun. I need to figure out how to get paid for that.
Or don't. Monetizing your leisure activity might well turn it into Just More Work that drains and stresses. Speaking for myself, I needed zero-stakes activities as a pressure relief valve when I was doing the corporate job, or I'd end up relying to chemicals to simulate that relaxation and get back to baseline. Benzos rot your brain, booze makes you fat; pottering in the ham shack does neither.
Mileage may vary, but the only times I really enjoy my job are when I get to really muck around with spreadsheets and handy little scripts. Most of the rest of it is just endlessly frustrating. It's possible I'm wrong, but I think my life satisfaction would be a lot higher if I could do that fill time and get paid.
>I can pretty easily do 16+ hour days if I'm doing something I enjoy
But is there context switching? I can probably do 12hrs of X, but if it's 8hrs of X + 4hrs of Y, X and Y being things I enjoy and want to do very much, I don't think I'd have the wherewithal to switch to Y after 8hrs of X. 12 hrs of X: you're already in the groove, you have the context, you're working toward a goal in a continuum. 4hrs of Y, you have to spend activation energy, fiddle a bit with finding where you left off, what the problem space was, before you get in the groove. That take-off alone will sap probably an hour. You can do it, but attended with all our human foibles, are you going to mentally decide you're going to start Y, after 8hrs of X?
Stress or being passionate can not explain all the difference between what people can do. They sure help, but if you then compare average person to someone like John Von Nueman or Ramanujan it's almost as if they are on different class of hardware.
I've found that I HAVE to stay in shape, sleep well and eat some approximation of healthy to maintain my mental performance for long periods, so many issues that I blamed purely on psychology or "how I was wired" really came down to I wasn't working out at all, was drinking too much on the weekends, and sitting in a cubicle for 8-9 hours a day.
That said, even today I can definitely work myself into a state where my brain just collapses if it attempts to do anything complex, and doing even the simplest chores seems like climbing Mt. Everest.
However I have some morbidly obese co-workers who still manage to keep up with me and stay sharp for longer in some cases. Likewise I've read some blogs about some people who genetically can be at full capacity, or near to it, off of 5 hours of sleep consistently. I'm honestly jealous
I'm sure he has a strong will but I think Carmack is some variety of biologically gifted for sure, lucky bastard.
Carmack is absolutely not the norm from a brain chemistry perspective. His level of obsessiveness is not naturally achievable for the vast majority of individuals. That whole post is very short-sighted and solipsistic
Having a hyperactive brain often requires unhealthy coping mechanisms and eccentric fuel sources. In his case, way too much processed food, soda, etc. There's no bottomless reservoir. some people prioritize their health. Other people prioritize other things, at the expense of their personal health or longevity.
Personally I'm pretty distrustful of documentaries. To be entertaining, they usually have to do some amount of narrative manipulation or propagandizing. There are many out there that open a small window into someone's life to make them look extremely evil or heroic while the reality is much more mundane. Some even manipulate interviews with credible people to prove the earth is flat or other nonsense. I love the book Blood Sweat and Pixels and find it very entertaining and inspiring, but I don't trust that it's a nuanced objective look on the 5 stories it covers or that the characters within are as perfect irl as they come off.
Of course, being a business owner gives you an additional level of passion and obsession with the work. The prospect of making fucking millions, and the power, and all that? Beats the HELL Out of being paid market rate to be cog #35 in the machine lol.
Honestly he sounds a bit narcissistic though. Especially in context. It's hilarious that I say that because I have a LOT of respect for him and iD software producing OpenGL games when everyone else was busy licking Microsoft's DirectX boots for that sweet sweet 24/7 dedicated Microsoft support and accomodation that Apple and the Linux community were never known for lol.
At the end of the day, you can be an astronaut or a surgeon or whatever and sure, you'll have your crazy weeks, but you'll also have a life outside of work. If they can live a normal life, IDK why I'd want to go working "passionate" long hours for a company that makes video games.
He writes it from a position of a business owner. He would get like 1/6 (?) of what Doom made?
Meanwhile someone who is a salaried worker is often not rewarded at all for doing any additional work. Often not even with paid overtime. If you finish a task fast you will get another task, not a promotion. The cynical take is that the managers (or business owners) cannot promote their key employees, because who will then do all the work on time?
In fact if the managers have a "star" and two "potatoes" they will usually reward the star with more work. Often without any noticable change in pay. Maybe some small bonus. But that bonus is often nothing when compared to real contribution. If you did 200% more work than the 2 potatoes you will oftenbget a 15% higher bonus. What is simply not worth it.
Even if you are a builder who likes to build - you are screwed. Most orgs dont even try to recognize their key talent. They dont know who pushes the company forward (apart from sales teams where it is relatively easy to indentify who sells more, but it doesnt often work that way - best sales people are those who open blue oceans - and I only saw that working once).
I actually agree with him that people who spend less hours will probably be less productive.
But as someone who switched jobs and had so far 40 half-hour meet and greet calls and who now sits for 6 hours per day in "alignment calls" I wonder when I am supposed yo do any actual work.
Im a "builder" but the organization does not give me time to build - constant distractions, constant "update calls" - and when I finally have 2 free hours my energy levels are drained by the useless stuff.
So those books that say that those big managers, leaders, builders wake up at 4am to do undistracted work - I understand. Or that they sit until late hours to actually do something, or even write emails in the evenings. In the (very good) book "Master's of doom" we could read that Carmac slept at the office. But at the end of the day he got millions from that.
A typical salaried person might get maybe 50% better bonus for spending your life in the office. So why do that? You waste a lot of hours for your life (say 2 hours per day) to get a bonus worth 0,5 of your monhly salary? One could calculate earnings per hour and come to a conclusion it is not worth it.
You are already paid what you are paid, the cynical view is do just enough to keep your spot and then optimize for leaving work after 8 hours and doing home stuff at work (buying stuff, reading news..).
The whole corporate reaward structure does not reward you for work. It rewards you gor visibility.
On a side note: the japanese who stay at work for 12 hours per day seem to mostly sit there, do chores, online shopping, sleep. I actually believe that they make maybe 5 hours if work, but are available (what of course is useful) for 12. If they sat at work for 8 hours, would they have a productive 4 or 6 hours?
Most people arent savants like Carmac who are productive for 8 hours in an 8 hour job.
Carmac was in an undistracted "builder mode / rhytm" for months. In my corporate envitonments it is a good thing if I can get undistracted 2 hours.
Also most people arent rewarded adequatly for contributing more. If the company isnt yours or if you arent getting a % bonus, if you work long hours you will just have a shitty life. (Many poor people have a shitty life too obviously but with even less money)
Fuck at my new org I'm even double booked on 2 calls at the same time. Do you think I contributing much to any?
Why the whole org cant setup 2 hours with no distraction? Would everyone ignore it? Would many "people managers" who do nothing but distract have nothing to do? In addition reality is that lots of workers need someone standing behind them with a deadline / stick to do make them do work.
I maybe should start a blog, or read a book. But would everyone even want to read those thoughts and rants
I think Carmack is absolutely atypical. What he says could absolutely be true for him, but that doesn't mean it's going to be true for everybody. It might only be true for a specific group of outliers.
I can totally imagine that someone who's sufficiently intrinsically motivated, and has enough mental capacity, willpower or whatever to put in long hours, longer hours might very well produce a linear increase in productivity. But most people are going to be exhausted at some point. Or demotivated. And enough of that is going to bring productivity down.
So it's the kind of thing that might very well work for you, but you can't demand the same thing from others.
When I’m highly motivated and want to accomplish huge technical work I will shift to sleeping 2-3 hours, working 6, then sleeping 2-3 hours, I will keep doing that for as long as 4 days straight and do nothing but work, sleep, eat. I don’t tell many people this as they think you are crazy, but my family knows, and they think I have a mental health problem. I don’t at all. I function completely normally and fully regulated in all ways. I just really really want to accomplish something asap.
That's my optimal schedule too, but I cannot do it.
First two hours awake in the morning is devoted to toddler, which includes feeding him, dressing him, then waiting for 0730 so I can take him to school.
Similar schedule when he returns.
Hopefully when he's older things will be easier in the morning.
You certainly have mental or health problems.if you are not an alien and have the same dna as humans , 2 to 3 hours of sleep will absolutely not be enough for your health and brain productivity even if you believe otherwise
In a 24 hour period I’m getting 6-7 hours of sleep. The difference I find between regular days and single sleeping is that my mind is able to keep focused and in “flow”.
People mention REM and I don’t know how to be certain but I think I do hit REM, the fitbit refused to analyze sleep less than 4 hours for me, but when I’m just slightly over it, it reports good percentages of both REM and Deep, 23% REM and 21% Deep, according to them above average. It never likes my durations though, always too short. I only sleep 6 hours on average according to it.
I suspect Carmack is atypical, which is probably why he achieved great things.
We're all different. I certainly know people who can be focused for more than seven hours a day (some colleagues, me when I was younger, my family doctor, my dentist). Personally, as an introvert, what drains me most is interacting with people. I think I could be coding 7 hours on my personal project and still be rather fresh. But this isn't what my job looks like, unfortunately.
He’s definitely atypical. I’m certainly not like him. I won’t ever revolutionize an industry — and that’s OK. I’d like to do it in theory, but if it meant being in an office 16 hours a day then I’ll pass. I’m more than happy he gets the spoils for his hard work and brilliance.
Same here, interacting with people makes my performance on all sorts of mental tasks drop much faster. 5-6 hours of meetings, and worst case I don't want to do anything else, best case I still need to go for a walk and another 30 minutes on top of that before I'm back to average coding skill.
On the flip side, even for coding I don't love, I can usually grind out 9-10 hours at fairly high productivity; I usually won't because I have other priorities to balance but I can. If I find what I'm working on really interesting, I can do 12 hours at high productivity.
For work, I try to have 2 days a week where I put most of my meetings so that hopefully at least 1 or 2 days of the rest are high productivity.
Reminds me of excess calories chess players burn when playing.
>Robert Sapolsky, who studies stress in primates at Stanford University, says a chess player can burn up to 6,000 calories a day while playing in a tournament, three times what an average person consumes in a day.[1]
Don't get me wrong, I'm sure it's mentally exhausting, but I can't help but feel like pieces like these are intentionally trying to create hype for hype's sake. Just by basic understanding of how human metabolism works, these players would need to be eating an absurd amount, or losing an absurd amount of weight each tournament. That's nearly half of what a powerlifter eats each day. Not to mention that the sheer amount of heat your body would give off burning through that many calories. The only believable number given in that article is the claim that Russian grandmaster Mikhail Antipov burned 560 calories in 2 hours of intense chess, which doesn't even come close to scaling to the claimed 6000 calories/day figure given the amount of time these guys play every day during a tournament.
Indeed. The 6000 number has floated around for a while and is an exaggeration.
It is true that chess at the competitive level burns calories. (More like an extra 1000 a day during a tournament.) Coupled with tournaments not allowing food, players do lose weight over a few days! But like you said, the 6000 number is an exaggeration.
Restricted shitty breathing, both chronic and short term, jack up your blood pressure, stress and cortisol levels, etc. Healthy athletes know how to breathe. Chess is no different. You can be a great chess player in spite of your terrible body mechanics, breathing patterns, etc. It doesn't mean it's "good" for you, and certainly doesn't mean it's unavoidable.
the same thing goes for physical labor. Exhaling is mechanically how you lose body fat. Breathing more isn't sustainable without creating demand, but if it were sustainable you could just breath faster to lose weight.
Exhaling is how you lose fat, because you're sitting on your chair all day. That's the baseline. If you were actually doing sport you'd lose fat by breaking down ATP when repeatedly contracting your muscles.
I don't think that's how you lose fat. You get rid of the exhaust generated during the chemical fat burning process. If you couldn't exhale you would still burn fat.
You miss the point of the parent, which is that exhaling is not a chemical process. The point being that the CO2 you exhale is "somehow produced by something", and once it's there you have to exhale it.
That's a way of saying that breathing faster won't burn more fat just because of the breathing: burning fat is a bit more elaborate than that.
The difference is that while most try to do their hobbies (e.g. game dev) after 8 hours of CRUD/boring/exhausting employment (working for others), Carmack had his hobby (game dev) as his day job, and also, he worked for himself - he never was an employee.
Big fan of Carmack but yes, he was blessed to have his interests, abilities and 'job' align near perfectly.
Being able to solve interesting problems all day and directly reap the rewards is positively alien to the avg SWE enduring their 9-5 grind on 'business problems' in a CRUD gulag to pay off their boss' new yacht.
Seven hours of focused mental work makes me bad at more focused mental work, but it doesn't make me bad at socializing or physical activities, for example, which is exactly what he's trying to say.
I disagree with Carmack that most jobs have enough different types of work that you can always find something you're not already burnt out on. That's one thing I think he's missing.
But if you figure out what things actually nourish or recharge you and which drain you (which may not be what you think at all and can take some effort and time to figure out), I'd hope you aren't left in the Reddit-swiping vegetative state quite so much! That's another thing I think he's missing: his work was actually nourishing for him, which isn't true for everyone. That's why in some ways being obsessive is "easier", you have a self-recharging activity and don't have to figure that out like everyone else!
> Seven hours of focused mental work makes me bad at more focused mental work, but it doesn't make me bad at socializing or physical activities, for example, which is exactly what he's trying to say.
I’m exactly like this too. I enjoy my work way more than average, but depending on the day I have between 6 and 12 (median 7) focused hours to do work before my brain sort of grinds to a halt. But when I get home, if I unwind mindfully and don’t get trapped on HN or YouTube, I can go meet some friends for dinner or go to the climbing gym, and that feels energizing instead of draining.
In-person interviews are kind've a weird thing to just throw in there. I'd describe them as very, very different than the focused mental work that happens during the normal course of a day job.
Interviews are high stress, emotionally draining, and, honestly, frequently rather degrading due to being talked down to. It's like having the fight or flight part of your brain firing on max for 5 hours. I agree that the only thing I really want to do at the end of such days is turn off.
That is wildly different from my day to day. After work, I'm still hyped to go to the gym, do some woodworking, program more, study. The world is an exciting place.
I've also found that if I succumb to the reddit infinite-scroll, a sense of numbness washes over me that takes awhile to shake free. I scroll like I'm seeking a high and nothing is doing it. Contrast that with, say, reading a book after work. Such a thing has never left me feeling the same empty feeling.
that's interesting, for me interviews feel very similar to the work I do day-to-day, except I need to be on the whole time. If I have a work task like a tight deadline or urgent production issue that requires maximum effort for 5–8 hours then the feeling is very similar to how I feel after an interview. Maybe I am too close to the "fight-or-flight" mode during normal, lower-stakes work.
There are plenty of people who do side projects outside of work, train for marathons, etc. That doesn't mean you're atypical - most people don't run marathons, for instance - but I don't think Carmack is this wild, totally out-of-band 1 in a million in terms of energy/motivation
It's because he is completely out of touch with the experience of the average person. This is a guy with a net worth of $50M, world famous in his field, that can tell anyone to fuck off.
His time outside of work is undoubtedly much more free and dedicated to recharging than the one of the guy that has to do chores on the weekend and has effectively barely any rest.
Carmack falls into the old fallacy of "This is my experience so it must be everyone elses experience too". Just because obsession is fulfilling for him and he manages to make it work, it doesn't mean it's fulfilling to others. And yes a lot of people don't care about their work, that is the reality of the world. Most people aren't priviledged enough to have the opportunity to work on their passions. The average person needs more free time to themselves, to recharge, to self actualize, it's not about being "lazy", different people have different values and society would be better off respecting that fact. It's easy to give your life to work if you have ownership of that work like Carmack does...
It obviously depends on the person and their approach. Nobody is confused why elite athletes can run faster/longer but there is a lot of debate about "work-life balance". Being a "workaholic" is similar to being an elite athlete if done right, and for most people it requires lots of ramp up time to being able to work longer hours as well as proper "conditioning" such as diet/exercise consideration, as well as a genetic predisposition and explicit effort toward maintaining psych.
I can do tons of work if it's motivating. Most of what's available is tedium and incremental bullshit.
Actually I'll go further and say most of our work is a net negative for society. Ads are just psychological manipulation to trigger feelings of jealously and greed. Or producing new mixed plastic silicon junk with a 3-year supported software stack but could run for a decade but then millennia in the trash dump. PFAs in all our water supplies.
If you read more from Carmack, I think you can see why. He pretty much just works on things he finds interesting. Even at FB/Meta, he avoided the draining work of active leadership and was basically a research scientist that occasionally made posts to try and influence people.
It's pretty easy in my experience to work long hours on things that are intellectually engaging. It's the stuff which is frustrating and causes stress/burnout that is hard to work on all the time. I could easily spend 50 hours a week building a compiler but not 50 hours a week writing google docs, sitting in meetings, and talking to people - that would kill me.
I think you miss the point (or I misinterpret it).
What he is saying, is that success has a price. If you want to achieve something great, you need to work your ass off (well, unless you're inheriting a fortune or some other unusual situations). When you work in a job where giving your best doesn't make much difference - that may be not obvious. But if you are working towards meaningful, it does - a huge one.
I'm good for about 3-4 hours of focused knowledge work a day before I need a break or change in context. In the evenings when things are much quieter in my environment, I can squeeze in another 1-2 hours if its necessary.
I do agree with the "go to the gym" part of his spiel.
Clicking through Reddit seems to burn the same mental energy needed to program. So you can't program for 6 hours, Reddit for an hour, then program like you're fresh again. If you sit outside and gaze at the clouds & trees for an hour instead, your programming neurons will be rested and ready to fire again for a few more hours.
YMMV I guess, but I'd be surprised if anyone's programming neurons are replenished by memes. Maybe by a nice movie.
Mental faculties are like muscle in that they get tired and need rest. A difference is that it's easy to sense how tired muscles are and hard to sense how tired the mind is.
Simply the observation that my programming ability isn't restored by doing some things, but is restored by doing others.
Because I haven't done an RCT, there are potential confounds. Perhaps I'm more likely to reddit (vs go outside) when I'm lower on energy to begin with. And there's a lot of noise, and the metrics are subjective.
Also: relaxing takes some practice. One can sit in a beautiful place with spa music playing and still have one's mind buzzing, so it wouldn't be restorative. Taking a proper mental rest took me years to get good at.
Another caveat: "mental energy" is a metaphor that may not exactly correspond to something physical like neuron ATP levels or whatever. And there are many parts of the brain, and different activities use different subsets, so activities overlap in strange ways. Still, as far as self-cognitive-science goes, I'm relatively confident in this observation.
I need some time to recover to get my brain functioning again. When I finish my 8 to 4 work day of average intensity (as in not exceptionally stressful or busy), WFH I'm with my kids, there are a lot of things I can't do until I have some rest. You mention hangover, perhaps. Is more like waking up after only sleeping 4 hours.
When the kids are on bed and the house jobs are done, say 9pm I can have a shower and I may be 80% to do any intellectual activity. Sometimes, as you say, may be watching a series or something like that; definitely not rockets.
Carmack is very much atypical, but I don’t think getting completely wiped after 7 hours of any focused work is normal, either. It’s certainly the case if you are doing 7 hours of something you hate or find tedious. I would probably be fried doing 7 hours of nothing but code reviews. But if I’m building something I feel excited about, I can work as many hours as my life obligations will allow and feel pretty good about it. Lots of people have no trouble playing 12 straight hours of civilization or other focused video games.
7 straight hours of anything will fry me. But most people in the technology field (hell, any field) don't work for 7 straight hours. They work for a couple hours at a time and take breaks in between. I'd be surprised if most office workers do more than 4 hours of actual work a day
People are very different. My gf cannot sit down and work for more than an hour before she needs to go for a walk and take breaks. In general, she doesn’t find office/computer work fulfilling and is looking for a more dynamic career.
I on the other hand can go 12 hours getting up once or twice to go to WC and will skip lunch. Taking a break most of the time sounds like a punishment. When I’m working on a problem and hold a lot of information in my working memory taking a break would only set me way back. Meetings are avoided unless absolutely necessary. Emails and messages are answered before I shut down as they don’t require much focus. That’s how I love working. But I’m also very introverted and robotic. I need to find a more balanced approach and appreciate my gf’s influence on me but it doesn’t come naturally to me.
I’ve worked for a decade in academic labs where 90 hour weeks were normal and you get two weeks off in a year. Not just grunt work but reading writing analyzing complex experiments etc.
I then came to tech and started coding. It was a breath of relief. I didn’t know what you’re supposed to do on saturdays!
But when you get in the zone and start writing a large amount of non-crud code, seven hours is kinda the max. You’re totally wiped out. Coding a complex application is quite unlike anything except writing a complex novel or technical document. No one, I mean NO ONE who writes well writes for 11 hours a day lol. The most prolific writers average an hour.
I get tunnel vision when I've been coding for several hours. I'll be stuck on a problem and I'll keep switching back to the same two areas of focus that I've already exhausted. I'll get frustrated because the problem seems totally inexplicable. The other day I was stuck on such a problem at 8pm. My sister in law suggested I just go to sleep, and look at the problem with fresh eyes tomorrow. Doing what she said, I solved the (stupidly simple) problem within 5 minutes of turning my laptop on the next day.
There are SO MANY environmental and physiological factors which go into your state of mind. Some variables that I try to control for:
1. What (if anything) did you eat today
2. How much water did you drink
3. Did you shower today
4. How much sleep did you get, or how long have you been awake (probably the most important one right here)
5. What is the warmth of the light where you are working (is it cloudy and rainy outside?)
6. What is the temperature of the room
7. Is anything else going on in your life occupying your mind right now? If you take medication: did you take your medications?
8. Did you exercise today? Do you exercise at all? Are you healthy?
9. How is your posture?
10. Is your work environment clean? Is it noisy?
11. Do you work better with music on, or in silence?
12. Did you drink so much caffeine that you are now manic and can't focus?
I think it depends precisely what you are doing. There is a difference between low cognitive effort (e.g. reading) and high effort (e.g. creating an algorithm or playing chess). Low effort uses glucose, whereas high-effort requires the microglia (the brain's immune cells) to create lactate and transport it to the neurons. Excess microglia activation has been linked to anxiety, depression and neuroinflammation.
I suspect it's not physically possible for a chess grandmaster to play for 90 hours a week, but probably quite easy for the average person to read or write for 90 hours a week (with some breaks).
>start writing a large amount of non-crud code, seven hours is kinda the max.
Most programming jobs are just writing "crud code" if you want to call it that...basically mostly meetings, and cranking out banal code. You can certainly do this for 90 hours a week without fatigue, although it will likely lead to burnout in the long-term, so it's probably better to find a job that does require significant mental effort, but without requiring 90 hour weeks.
Well, again it depends. I was just reading a few reviews on microglia before replying to your comment, in order to update my knowledge, and I would describe it as very light effort...I'd guess I didn't enter into the lactate territory. It's nothing like coming up with an algorithm or trying to solve a problem.
The only time I've found it has come close is when actually writing a hypothesis or review paper: having to read through the literature in order to come up with a coherent theory while juggling the concepts in my head. It's very similar to solving a programming problem, and does involve significant mental effort.
But it probably also depends on the speed that it's done at. For complex algorithms or prototypes I prefer to just power through and get the whole thing done to the prototype stage in half a day (or whatever it takes, depending on the complexity), then spend the next month (or whatever) fleshing it out. There are probably other ways of doing it that don't require such cognitive effort at the beginning, but I find that for complex problems that's sometimes the best way of solving them, at least in my experience, and it only involves significant mental effort for a very short period of time.
> Most programming jobs are just writing "crud code" if you want to call it that...basically mostly meetings, and cranking out banal code.
I would say that in such instances, often times the code is banal, but proper modeling of the reality, even in cases where final result looks like a classical crud, is where complexity hides.
I say "hides", because, from my experience, only those directly involved in the implementation are actually mentally exposed to it. If they care about the quality of the output, that is.
If I'm passionate about something I can code non stop for like 2 days in a row without sleeping (been there done that) I'm not saying my code will look right at that point, or that it's a healthy thing to do, but I don't think the upper bound of maximal throughput + quality is at 7h a day either (or that you should even aim for maximum throughput + quality).
I’m usually fried after 4-5 hours. And I can do pretty much whatever I want. But I’m also 58. When I was younger I could do more, but causality is hard to pin down because there was no internet then.
> If you only have seven good hours a day in you, does that mean the rest of the day that you spend with your family, reading, exercising at the gym, or whatever other virtuous activity you would be spending your time on, are all done poorly?
Most people, and let me qualify them as serious people, have real problems figuring out how to accept higher training volume without injury in sport or tech or business or whatever.
It's great that John is this monster endurance tech athlete with amazing results, but in the same way that the dude that ran a 50k or 100k last weekend might not be the best person to emulate for you, John probably doesn't align with what makes sense for 99.9% of the world's tech population.
Shorter work weeks make sense for almost everyone working in tech. I'd put in more 9s, non-ironically, but it's a bad look.
Since the post is tagged 2016, I think it is also more likely than not that John would agree with this now; it's very possible that he'd also agree with it then, but I didn't go beyond the linked comment.
I think this is exactly what Carmack is talking about: athlete engineers. It's a bit hard to see this with engineers, as you don't necessarily know how much someone contributes to something, but if you look at Academia you will clearly see that the best and most productive researchers are the one that work nonstop.
If you want to be good, achieve, and be able to compete, you will have to work your ass off. He's just right, and if you think he's not and you want to achieve something then you will learn some harsh lessons.
On the other hand, should everyone aim at being a competitive engineer? No. There's plenty of other things that life can offer.
But in America, what's the default? Making people work as much as possible. Cross the Atlantic pond and your mind will be blown at how many holidays per year workers get.
> "if you look at Academia you will clearly see that the best and most productive researchers are the one that work nonstop."
Price's Law[1]: "Derek de Solla Price, a British physicist, historian of science, and information scientist, discovered something about his peers in academia. He noticed that there were always a handful of people who dominated the publications within a subject. Price recognized a pattern which was later named after him.
50% of the work is done by the square root of the total number of people who participate in the work.
Only a handful of people produce half of the results in any given field or company. You may have observed this phenomena throughout your experiences in life. You are working on a team, and there are the superstars who do most of the work or seem to produce most of the outcomes and then there is everyone else."
Presumably your school project group contained many people who didn't want to be there, weren't interested in the task and had nothing important riding on the outcome. How did you conclude from that experience that academic research environments where the people chose to be there, were interested in the subject enough to make it the main work of their daily lives, relied on their income for their survival, and were not working in forced groups, would show the same pattern?
> but if you look at Academia you will clearly see that the best and most productive researchers are the one that work nonstop.
And those researchers (at least those I know personally) get health issues due to the complete asinine work load. Including a well respected professor just getting straight up heart problems every time he would get onto his old campus.
We should seriously reconsider what we glorify in academia before it gets to late.
Meanwhile, cross the Pacific pond and you'll be begging to come back to America. It's not an America-exclusive issue: I'd wager most societies now have ended up valuing success and work over all else, even if it's detrimental.
Asia has a huge problem with the last couple of generations and quiet quitting. Valuing work over everything has never been sustainable because the rewards aren't what most humans deeply value.
The argument for shorter work weeks isn't that it would make these top athlete engineers more (or at least not less) productive, but that it does do for the bulk of average engineers. I think Carmack is arguing against a straw man if he thinks people are claiming that the best way to make the most obsessive engineers the most productive is to work less.
This is not an America thing. Even in Spain which by all accounts of my friends is considered the most laid back place in the planet, top academic labs do the grind you mention.
This is not new either. Top Academia has been like this for a century. I’m not completely sure if this is a good or a bad thing. Perhaps it’s a necessity. Maybe it’s not. But it is universal.
Maybe sherpa engineer? An athlete actually rests so their muscles
can grow. A sherpa just goes non stop lugging shit up and down the mountain.
Also unless you run brain scans and video feeds of someone and their screen 24/7 you don’t really know the hours they do even if they are in their office chair.
> Also unless you run brain scans and video feeds of someone and their screen 24/7 you don’t really know the hours they do even if they are in their office chair.
IME most people don't know how many hours they actually worked vs hours they were in their chair. Most folks also overestimate their productivity from "multi-tasking", despite the overwhelming research showing productivity losses.
> Conversely no one knows the productivity gains and work related work going on in the brain while walking the dog and yelling hi to a neighbour.
It would be hard to quantify, but it could be done
There are different arguments for "Folks should be allowed more time off, e.g. walk the dog" and "Folks can multi-task while working, e.g. walk the dog and talk on conference calls."
My argument (and I think your comment) was related to the latter, that human beings are more likely to overestimate their productivity, which various studies have shown.
> "If you want to be good, achieve, and be able to compete, you will have to work your ass off. He's just right,"
Terence Tao on hard work[1]: "One needs to do a serious amount of reading and writing, and not just thinking, in order to get anywhere serious in mathematics; contrary to public opinion, mathematical breakthroughs are not powered solely (or even primarily) by “Eureka” moments of genius, but are in fact largely a product of hard work, directed of course by experience and intuition. (See also “the cult of genius“.)"
Computer Scientest who developed error correction codes Richard Hamming said something like "I stormed into the supervisor's office and demanded to know how John Tukey could be the same age as me and know so much. 'You would be surprised how much you'd know if you worked as hard as he works' said the supervisor. I slunk out of the office and since then tried to work harder, and it helped me know a lot more".
Nobel Prize winning physicist Paul Dirac, from Wikipedia: "Dirac himself wrote in his diary during his postgraduate years that he concentrated solely on his research, and stopped only on Sunday when he took long strolls alone." and later in his life "Korean physicist, Y. S. Kim, who met and was influenced by Dirac, also says: "It is quite fortunate for the physics community that Manci [Mrs Dirac] took good care of our respected Paul A. M. Dirac. Dirac published eleven papers during the period 1939–46. Dirac was able to maintain his normal research productivity only because Manci was in charge of everything else".
Nobel Prize winning physicist Gerard 't Hooft[2] on learning physics: "You won’t get your Nobel Prize for free, and remember, all of this together takes our students at least 5 years of intense study (at least one reader was surprised at this statement, saying that (s)he would never master this in 5 years; indeed, I am addressing people who plan to spend most of their time to this study)"
> "But in America, what's the default? Making people work as much as possible. Cross the Atlantic pond and your mind will be blown at how many holidays per year workers get."
And how much less money they/we earn. Americans in tech scoff at the idea of doing a Tier 1 helpdesk job because it's not enough money to get out of bed for, when it's paying almost double the average UK household income.
When I was young, in my late teens and even through to my late 20s, I could code for the majority of my waking hours.
Now I'm old, with teenage kids, and a more managerial (but still self-employed) kind of job... well let's just say after spending most of the day in MS Word, I bailed from the coworking space at 3pm... and fell asleep on my couch at 4.
If I find myself back in my happy place (coding) then I am still able to code for much longer hours, but I definitely notice my fatigue levels rising, and this is definitely reflected in the quality of my work.
I suspect the vast majority of working people are not doing jobs which are as fulfilling as coding is to me, and many probably wish they could go home and crash on the couch at 4pm. Shorter working hours will benefit them.
Given the rising levels of inequality, it's also an easy form of redistribution, and I was a little disappointed that Carmack didn't address that, but admittedly it wasn't really the thrust of his post.
I do wonder how much of this is genetic. I know people who just need less sleep than I do (which I believe is genetic), and they can be more productive than me no matter how hard I try. I just need more time to rest than they do.
After a few hours (5ish) of deep work, I can't think straight, and start overthinking problems. I could probably train myself to go longer, but likely not that much longer. So I wonder if there is a genetic basis to that.
(Although even if there is, I doubt people like John Carmack would understand)
More anecdata, since I've felt both the same way as most of the commenters here, and as Carmack
If I have a bunch of tasks that are part of something interesting and worthwhile to do, and I don't need to meet with people to get them done, I can hang out and work on those tasks for 14 hours no problem. I can keep doing that every day for a really long time too, I don't get burned out.
BUT in the real world that's almost never the case. That's how it worked when I was making unsuccessful SaaS business attempts and drawing down my savings. Now that I'm back in Silicon Valley working for the FANGMAN on a tiny piece of His next attempt at world domination, I get exhausted and burned out pretty quick. I've got maybe 4 good hours of concentrated effort in me per day, it's a struggle to drag myself into the office, the week just crawls by and the weekend is gone in a flash..
>Now that I'm back in Silicon Valley working for the FANGMAN on a tiny piece of His next attempt at world domination, I get exhausted and burned out pretty quick. I've got maybe 4 good hours of concentrated effort in me per day, it's a struggle to drag myself into the office, the week just crawls by and the weekend is gone in a flash..
It helps to disconnect from whatever it is the company is doing and value your time and expertise more. The success of whatever you're working on is not a reflection of you or your skills. Oh that experiment didn't work? That new product feature flopped? Meh, I'm paid by the hour to execute my expertise at my comfortable pace toward their goal regardless of how realistic or achievable it is. Embrace the jira ticket monkey mindset. Don't try to work around the org inefficiencies, embrace and amplify them. Oh I need to wait for some indeterminate time for access/permission? Blocked by another team? Scheduled for stupid meetings sprinkled through the day such that you can't get a proper maker's schedule[1]? The work isn't structured well? The priorities change frequently enough for whiplash? I get paid regardless. So what if my productivity or output is low due to their nonsense? Disconnecting mentally really helps prevent the exhaustion and burnout. Don't try to do the PO's/PM's/Boss' job. It's their money to waste, their dumb decisions to make, and none of it is your concern.
At least for me, a healthy dose of perspective makes it much easier to go into the office; enjoy the amenities, free feed, and getting some social time in. The weather has been fantastic the last few weeks and I've been cycling into work. I save my quality mental focus for other things, including keeping an eye out for gigs and opportunities where it makes sense to mentally connect.
There isnt much about genes. John Carmack is fortunate enough to do what he likes and what he likes seems to generate revenue. When you do something you enjoy and are in control of your own fate believe me you can work longer hours without noticing.
Even the slightest adjustment to your liking can increase your productivity. Thats why people working from home, in a nice environment are more productive than those in a forced environment. Even cattle produce more milk when they are in an environment they like.
Carmack also has no meaningful idea as to how software is actually developed. He was exceptionally fortunate to have found success enough for life in the early 90s. He never had to deal with the real world. I don't know why anyone not in his same privileged as hell position would listen to him on nearly anything he has to say. And I say none of this to put the guy down. He's just not in the position nearly every one of us is.
Mutations in genes known as ADRB1 and DEC2 do indeed exist, and they give the bearers a permanent reduction in amount of time they need to sleep. It is suspected there are more.
I guess my question is: is there a similar genetic basis for ability to hyperfocus for long periods of time without fatigue? Or is it purely something that is developed.
ADHD is likely partly genetic. Savant syndrome is maybe genetic or at least acquired early.
Just requiring less sleep is still a huge advantage though.
Carmack was on the Lex Fridman podcast last year and doubled down on these comments and actually went even further. He has not changed his mind at all.
I listened to that podcast back then, and I don't think that's quite true. He actually backed down a bit. Going from memory, while he did reiterate more hours = more accomplished, he also agreed that how many hours of productive work you can do in a week varies between people (I think the way he stated it was that most people will burn out doing crazy hours, so he admitted it's not sustainable). He said it's lesson he'd learnt at some point but because he's immune to burn out and has an insane work ethic it's something he didn't understand back when he pushed John Romero out of id for not working hard enough.
I don’t know if you are a runner but 20k on the track is pretty hard mentally. I would prefer 20k on the trail where it really sometimes feels like no effort whatsoever.
>Since the post is tagged 2016, I think it is also more likely than not that John would agree with this now; it's very possible that he'd also agree with it then, but I didn't go beyond the linked comment.
He completely agreed with his 2016 self in the Lex Fridman podcast he did last year.
That was one of my favourite moments in any podcast.
JC: And you can't really keep working forever. After a while you just stop being as capable. For instance after 13 hours, my output starts to drop.
Hahaha. Fucking brilliant mate.
But really, in the end, there's no reason for all this back and forth waffling. It's possible, he's shown us. If you prioritize it maybe it's worth a shot. If you don't, then don't.
But the reality is you prioritize what you do. Maybe you prioritize HN or Reddit. Who can tell. In the end, no one else needs to be convinced - only you at the moment.
About the only great sadness is low agency - where people believe that they can't control anything.
> This particular article does touch on a goal that isn’t usually explicitly stated: it would make the world “less unequal” if everyone was prevented from working longer hours. Yes, it would, but I am deeply appalled at the thought of trading away individual freedom of action and additional value in the world for that goal.
Individual freedom seems to be in the mouth of all millionaires that can afford that freedom. Most people has to work to live and their freedom of choice ends there. And it is already forbidden in most countries to "work as many hours as you want" because is the only way to avoid a race to the bottom were everybody, except the rich, suffer.
This is a clear example of bias and that the fact that a guy is talented in one thing does not make him be able to understand a different one.
> it is already forbidden in most countries to "work as many hours as you want" because is the only way to avoid a race to the bottom were everybody, except the rich, suffer.
Remember that Carmack is in the US, where this is not forbidden.
working over 40h is only « forbidden » where i live because paying 1.5x/h is not acceptable from the employer’s pov. it’s annoying from the worker’s pov since you’re necessarily capped at 40h if your employer doesn’t want to pay that rate.
i don’t understand your race to the bottom argument.
> i don’t understand your race to the bottom argument.
Look at work culture in the United States or parts of Asia, where the goal is to extract as much production out of the workers as possible and if it grinds them to dust, that's their own personal failing and you will just swap out the faulty cog for a fresh one.
It gets absurd when you look at Japan's performative long hours. It's not even financially beneficial by that point.
Unfortunately, culture follows economic conditions, not the other way around. So without a legal limit, I believe not only that culture would permit it, but also it would find a way to justify it.
(See e.g. US work ethics/protestant work culture.)
There is a workaround against that: Have a legal requirement that overtime should average to zero or less (to allow for part-time employees) over the course of a year across all employees of the workplace.
Lots of jobs require mandatory overtime, whether salaried office jobs which expect folks to finish unreasonable workloads or hourly physical jobs which have artificially limited the number of workers (by regulations or union contracts) but have minimum staffing levels, e.g. police, prisons, assembly line workers, etc.
There isn't one single culture here. Plenty of cultures not just permit it, they expect it.
It’s impossible to regulate how much software engineers work. No country has bureaucrats making sure you’re not sitting at home on your laptop writing code at 2 in the morning.
I have done that in the past and I agree that there are (extremely) rare situations where this is helpful or might be warranted. In general though, this is not good behavior and I would personally advise against this.
One time a bug bothered me to no end, I kept thinking about it all the time. I then sat down at 10pm and started debugging / tinkering. I finally solved the issue some time that night and got back to work the next day, reporting my success to the team. Great.
While it was a helpful fix for the team it wasn't super important. After I reflected some of this process, I realized that it wasn't my curiosity or passion that was driving me. It was a bad relationship with work. I was still quite new and I wanted to prove myself - this pressure is what drove me.
My endeavor brought next to no personal advantage, rather it was a detriment. I spent my free time, my sleep even, to fix a mediocre bug which I simply could have done the next day. Even if I took two or three days, no bottom line would have been affected. Barely anyone would have bothered, asked or cared. So what's left was some idea of opportunity cost - since the bug was fixed I was now free for other work. But the value of that is also hypothetical!
In the end, I think working for someone else, especially a generic corporation, is way different from personal projects or startup products that you are passionate about and really deeply care that it succeeds. I will reliably perform my duties and try to be efficient at it, but I will NEVER let big corpos take away time from my life again just to improve some managers standing or bonus.
You can definitely find a good balance between fulfilling your position at or above expectations while respecting your personal life and health. I do not hesitate to take sick days, I prioritize my family and friends. Working 4 days per week has been show to drastically reduce sick days and other issues so while it might seem counterintuitive to some, I really believe that it's actually beneficial for everyone.
Note: I typically have a weird productivity surge between sunset and 2am that never gets used for work, obviously. Something about the early darkness triggers my mind...
If your parents are rich and you get some of that as an adult, you simply won't have to work, have strategy, and won't need as much discipline. You might not need these things at all, at least not on the same level as anyone poor. Or heck, you won't need as much as anyone mildly comfortable. Setbacks won't even affect you the same way, and you won't even have some of them. You won't risk losing your home because you had to miss work to get your car fixed, for example, both because your job allows for you to miss work and get paid and because you aren't driving those sorts of cars.
Not spending $5 gambling on the lottery (a vice!) isn't going to get you financial freedom, nor is avoiding drinking a couple times a month. If you are born in America and born poor, it is very unlikely that you'll be able to do anything but work your life away and barely make it. That sort of mobility - the sort folks site with the 'American dream' - simply isn't a thing. You don't work your way out of poverty: You luck your way out. Having rich parents is one of the biggest factors in whether or not you get this freedom in life.
> Whatever the grand strategy for success is, it gets broken down into lots of smaller tasks. When you hit a wall on one task, you could say “that’s it, I’m done for the day” and head home, or you could switch over to something else that has a different rhythm and get more accomplished. Even when you are clearly not at your peak, there is always plenty to do that doesn’t require your best, and it would actually be a waste to spend your best time on it. You can also “go to the gym” for your work by studying, exploring, and experimenting, spending more hours in service to the goal.
Absolutely true.
> I think most people excited by these articles are confusing not being aligned with their job’s goals with questions of effectiveness. If you don’t want to work, and don’t really care about your work, less hours for the same pay sounds great! If you personally care about what you are doing, you don’t stop at 40 hours a week because you think it is optimal for the work, but rather because you are balancing it against something else that you find equally important. Which is fine.
And this is really the key to the whole shorter work week argument. I agree with John; if you are running your own company or initiative in an area you are passionate about, the 40 hour week question probably doesn't even dawn on you. Why would you want to work less to achieve a goal you are ambitious to reach? If anything you are working more because you enjoy it and want to see more progress more quickly.
But most people working a typical job (even in tech) are not in a position to care deeply about their work and its outcomes - why that's the case is a separate discussion and probably differs person-to-person. A good amount of those people might even be working on things during those 40 hours that are a poor use of their individual time due to bad management, bureaucracy, inability to work on things they want to, etc. These people are not able to work 40+ hours things that feel or are as important as other things in their life such as side projects, family, exercise, etc. And so the 5 day, 40 hour workweek feels incompatible with their life.
> But most people working a typical job (even in tech) are not in a position to care deeply about their work and its outcomes
Perhaps most people - after looking at their paystub - are acutely aware that their employer doesn't deeply care about them. In my experience, there is a direct link between how much effort I put in going above and beyond in my work and how much higher (or lower) than average my salary was - with an inverse experience multiplier. I put in lot's of unrewarded effort fresh out of school. I didn't know any better, and probably used work to fill up down-time
Why do you need to put "productivity benefits" in quotes?
I hope I am misinterpreting this. It's been shown scientifically time and time again with actual data that this is the case [1, World Economic Forum] - denying this or being sarcastic about it seems really disingenuous and ideology-driven to me.
Is there someway to do a controlled double-blind study that I just can’t imagine? Because I can definitely imagine other causes in the studies described in that article.
"Most people" don't get to choose, they're stuck with 40. (Or more, for some salaried positions.) The idea is generally "all of your time".
In principle they can just not do those particular jobs. In practice most "careers" expect "full" time.
Some fields are inherently quite flexible, like some doctors/dentists can decide to not schedule anything for a week.
In the linked comment JC said "I am deeply appalled at the thought of trading away individual freedom of action and additional value in the world for that goal."
The fact that John Carmack thinks he needs to respond to articles targeted at the general population is a little bit surprising to me. Is it not obvious to John that he is at least 4-5 standard deviations from the mean here?
I would be more than happy to listen to John talk about what works for him and strategies that he finds effective. But hearing him try and critique articles targeted at the average person or average developer or even average 10x developer... like... Does he not understand how different other people's lives are than his? It reminds me of when you hear politicians try and talk about the struggles of regular people. It is so cringe.
I think he just very rarely has a moment when he’s just really done. Which is probably because he’s mostly worked on things that he wanted to be working on.
I find this mindset easy to replicate when working on my personal projects. Effectiveness may drop a bit after 1am for obvious reasons, but otherwise any hour is much like another.
The problem comes when trying to get yourself to do something that you don’t really want to do, or when you need to deal with the umpteenth time someone broke the same system due to the same mistake or the third discussion in a day where people miss the obvious solution. You can only have so much of that in a day before you mentally check out.
I believe working on something you really want to do is even just one variable. There's also stuff like:
1. Do you have enough ownership to at least sit at the table when it's decided what exactly you work on and how you do it? Can you affect strategy, goals, priorities, timelines and design?
2. Do you reap at least part of the reward (financial, appreciation, status)? Does it feel fair compared to what others get out of it based on their contribution?
3. Does the actual day to day work involve sufficient things that energise you, and few enough things that drain you? Do you have the power to delegate the latter to at least some degree?
I've never met an employee who can answer all of these with yes, but they're crucial for getting things done in a truly motivated and successful fashion, at least for me. Employers don't typically give up more power/rewards than they feel they have to, though.
Ever since I went independent, I have a lot of this. That power over my own work and fortune is a phenomenal motivator, and I really enjoy work these days. I know I can work less if I feel like it, it's my decision. I can only imagine how much _more_ of this Carmack has, being rich, successful and highly respected from a young age. I don't know him, but I'd give him the benefit of the doubt and say he must honestly have no idea what it's like to not have that.
It doesn't seem to me like he is generalizing from his experience and applying it to the general population. He's pushing back on the very specific claim that working fewer hours leads to higher productivity. He admits that this might be true for certain assembly line-type jobs or jobs where someone just wants to collect a paycheck, but it's not necessarily true in the case of knowledge workers who care about what they are working on. I think that applies to a substantial minority of people in developed countries.
He's pushing back on the idea with zero research and zero expertise.
You could literally ask your taxi driver for their thoughts and it would be as helpful.
I prefer to see what the outcomes are from real-world experiments which to date are showing that shorter work weeks can be effective in many situations.
Disagree. Sure, he's not an empirical researcher, but he does have decades of experience being highly productive. I think his opinion holds some weight. He's also clear that he's speaking from personal experience and not making a scientific claim.
He does not have a monopoly on being highly productive.
And I know he is not making a scientific claim because he is not done any research or has any background in this field. So his opinion does have weight. The same weight as literally any other random person on this planet.
Carmack has accomplished more in the span of a few years (e.g. 1992-1997) than most people do in a lifetime. Saying that his opinion about productivity is equivalent to a random person's is just a bad faith argument.
> but he does have decades of experience being highly productive
...in software engineering. But then he steers into talk about menial jobs. I worked minimum wage jobs for over a decade before I got an app published. I rather doubt Carmack worked a manual job for very long but perhaps someone can correct me.
> He's pushing back on the very specific claim that working fewer hours leads to higher productivity.
And rightfully so. Ask anyone who's been through the grind of a startup; for knowledge workers, pulling 80 hour weeks does get shit done faster than working 35 hour weeks. To say otherwise is wishful thinking.
But yes, he was responding specifically to a comment about his work ethic as described Masters of Doom. It's much different when you are working in a small team, on a project you're passionate about, which will make you an enormous amount of money if it succeeds.
Should you put in 80 hour weeks when you are FAANG employee #35,714? Probably not, unless you see some strategic career reason, i.e. project is public and high-profile which you can then leverage to get a job at a competitor for 50% raise, etc.
If you put in 80 hour weeks as FAANG employee #35,714, would you accomplish more? Absolutely. Would your personal life suffer? Absolutely.
> pulling 80 hour weeks does get shit done faster than working 35 hour weeks.
sure in the short run that holds true. its just not sustainable. most people will burn out spectacularly after a few months of this and prolly leave the industry entirely.
Man this comment resonated with me. I am fully capable of doing productive 80 hour weeks sustainably - I did most weeks for 15 years. Took me that amount of time (and marriage, kids etc.) to realize just because I can doesn't mean I should, especially now that I'm seeing diminishing returns in terms of reward. Still love my work, it has been difficult to dial back honestly.
Where did you find the time for this? That's 14 hrs per day with a two day weekend or 11 hours over seven days.
The 5 day week is 8am to 10pm which is just insane while I could probably do seven days for maybe a month, I definitely couldn't sustain this for fifteen years.
Even when I had a full time job and a PhD to finish, I rarely went over 60 so super curious how you accomplished this.
Wow, more power to you for being able to sustain that, I almost certainly couldn't. I can definitely do six days a week relatively consistently, but seven is definitely a bridge too far for me.
I do think that most people won't produce more (of the same quality) working 80 hours/wk unless they are exceptionally motivated.
However, with the right motivation, people will. I'm guessing that what that motivation looks like varies from person to person. For me, it's when I'm starting my own venture.
I'm willing to sacrifice to such an extreme degree for that. I cannot imagine any other company being able to come up with sufficient motivation to make it possible for me to work productively 80 hours/week, though. It's not a matter of me being willing to do it, it's a matter that I wouldn't be able to do it.
After the 5-10 hours a week when you are "in the zone" you start borrowing time. It's possible to sustain productivity for significantly longer than that, but it comes at the expense of rest, which leads to burnout.
When you burn out, you no longer get 5-10 hours of focus per week; that time goes to recovery from last week.
I find it rather cringe that we are judging where Carmack chooses to spend his spare time in a thread about people working less (where he was explicitly mentioned in the parent comment he responded to). In addition to being an engineer, he's a leader of engineering teams. He would benefit more than most from applying cutting edge managerial science in organizations he operates.
As an older engineer I find Carmack's observations interesting and quite accurate.
That’s an important point. In 2016, John Carmack is speaking as a manager who doesn’t even have to show up for his job about wanting to extract more value from the employees working under him on his hobby project. He wants them to work harder on his stupid VR goggles fetish.
It had been more than 20 years since Carmack pulled an all nighter working on Doom, and he’s been coasting along ever since.
"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."
the question is, when you "work" more, are you actually "working" more. I'm not advocating for either side, but I believe a few places that have moved to a shorter work week haven't seen lower productivity. Might be a sign that most people actually can't do ~40hrs of work per week.
I think if you take someone like me, and really most people, and have them sit in the office for an extra hour per day, you probably won't see much benefit. But I definitely feel like there are some people who grind work all day, putting in ridiculous hours, and they do amazingly work, beyond what 1.5 or even 2 people can do. Especially when you consider career progression over time, maybe the people who are hustling will have ranked up a couple times over an 8 hour/day person, and is contributing at a much higher level.
I think you make a good point that it's more complicated than "just stay longer", but I do also agree with GP that there is some kind of compounding interest when it comes to how many hours work. Don't know how it works though.
That’s because most people work at bullshit jobs they don’t care about, where productivity can’t be effectively measured and they are distracted more than half the day anyway. With a shorter day you are compelled to focus more to get essential things done and this is probably where people get the idea that you can accomplish just as much in fewer hours.
FWIW, as I'm edging close to burnout, I've noticed that at work, I exhibit one of two modes on any given day:
- If doing some incidental bullshit or chore or otherwise work that I don't like, I struggle to keep focus and am all stressed until I clock out, after which I eventually unwind and calm down;
- If doing something I like, or when I feel I'm making good progress, I'm highly focused and productive, but half-way through start to stress about coming end of work day; in those situations I absolutely do not want to stop working - and if given a chance, I'd continue until I'm done or too tired to continue.
With that in mind, I have mixed feelings towards the idea of a shorter work day. While I'd love to have more personal time, where I can exercise my autonomy, I'd also hate it on those days that I'm making good progress and don't want to stop.
You shouldn’t burn out, and we should design a system that doesn’t make you burn out, and then you won’t have to arrange your workflow around compensating for your burning out.
> but I believe a few places that have moved to a shorter work week haven't seen lower productivity
First, it's hard to measure, I wouldn't believe any of the studies I've seen at the moment (good or bad). (BTW I was the one who pushed for a 4-day week at my previous company.)
Second, lots of companies waste a lot of time with meetings. A shorter work week actually doesn't always translate in less work time, it can translate in useless meetings getting trimmed, and in people still working during time off but now being able to work during these days peacefully and focused.
I agree with you. Lots of positions ask you to stay "at work" when in reality all you are doing is watching your inbox for another email or something even less important.
But that assumes that productivity measure is accurate - which is almost certainly bullshit most of the time.
I'm perfectly fine with wanting a work / life balance and choosing a job just for the easy money. There is absolutely nothing wrong with it. 40, 35 hours per week, maybe 30 hours - depending on the country.
But whenever there is a job where the 'productivity' can be directly evaluated - say some parts of finance world, sports, startups, cooking come to mind too - it's crystal clear, that it's people who dedicate their lives to it that accomplish the most. And it's not even close.
My opinion is that on average, people achieve as much on less time, but individually, that may not be true. Evidently not for Carmack nor a lot of the high-performing, always-on people I know (though a lot of the time, them “working” doesn’t necessarily look like “work” in the traditional sense).
Is more hours more work, though? If so, on what basis?
Frequently when the team was crunching at work, the result was that people had to bring their personal lives into the work hours in order to be able to actually stay at work longer, whether it meant making personal phone calls (because they couldn't postpone them until home), or even bringing their kids into the office for a few hours before going home. That was not Productive Work Time.
Similarly if someone comes in to work while sick, I don't think you can argue that those 8+ hours spent working with a cold or the flu are going to be at full productivity, and then they probably make their coworkers sick too.
> This particular article does touch on a goal that isn’t usually explicitly stated: it would make the world “less unequal” if everyone was prevented from working longer hours. Yes, it would, but I am deeply appalled at the thought of trading away individual freedom of action and additional value in the world for that goal.
The conclusion that an article discussing productivity research is secret conspiracy against people who want to work a lot of hours, is a bit mind boggling.
He never suggests he's tried working fewer hours. Have to wonder if the guy is just one of those people incapable of taking a break.
Pretty sure that’s the case. He has one deep interest at a time and literally everything else is a distraction from that.
He is a “live to work” person who’s never had to “work to live” since his first couple years when the learning of it was enough to sustain his forward movement.
Sure he has crap work he needs to do, but it’s all in service of what he already cares about. So no cognitive dissonance.
As someone who worked 10-14 hour days in their 20s, I know for a fact it made me more effective and I achieved more. I also scaled way back in my 30s to have more of a life. I don't regret either decision. What Carmack says maps to my own experiences. People making ad hominem attacks at Carmack for why he's wrong are just that may be in for a rude awakening in life.
What I think is really at odds in the comments is this: people want to work less and feel like it's ok, but don't feel like it's appropriate to come out and say that.
One could argue the opposite: those who are defending Carmack are working too much and want to feel that it's worth it.
Sure, I have had 16 hour days that we're worth it. I have also had only 10 hour days banging my head against the same problem for hours only to solve it in 10 minutes in the morning. I experience these diminishing returns on most of my longer days and am lucky enough to know how to identify them and walk away.
I would hope everyone here would agree that Carmack is atypical. I think the real take away from the thread is that you should take time to know yourself, your potential and limits, what you want and what makes you happy, and what it takes to get there. Most of the comments I feel are arguing what the ideal way to work is, which is a farce. Maybe a lot of these comments are fueled from social/cultural/industry pressures telling them they should be a certain kind of engineer. I work in Sweden, and it seems from a work culture standpoint, they are far less interested in squeezing every ounce of value from their employees in comparison to the US. Meanwhile, I'd say they are still very competitive in a software sense, especially in gaming.
10-12 hour days can be great for getting shit done especially if it takes time to get going.
But that can also be combined with 3 or 4 day work weeks (and not necessarily repeated long weekends, day on day off day on can be good too for some people).
I agree with you 100%. Carmack also says he ensures he gets enough sleep. As long as you get 7-8h a day and take care of yourself reasonably well with food and the occasional run you can work more than 40h/week focused and be very productive in those extra hours. What surprises me most about Carmack is that for him the “why am I working so much? for what? I want a life” moment never came but maybe that’s because he’s been his own boss for almost his whole life working on passion projects. He openly said for both Armadillo and Occulus/Facebook that he started doing less when the passion fades or the corporate BS became too much.
> Given two equally talented people, the one that pursues a goal obsessively, for well over 40 hours a week, is going to achieve more. They might be less happy and healthy, but I’m not even sure about that.
What worked for me and my current partner is being upfront about my career goals and the lengths I was willing to go to achieve them. I’ve now been in a strong relationship for 7+ years which is twice whatever I lasted with other partners who found me sometimes reserving a weekend to work/research a deal killer.
I think you are reading too much into it. All I shared is something that helped me find a partner who enjoyed who I am and understood my priorities. I was hoping to help. The advice sure would have helped me earlier in life.
This is a silly point to make and discuss because the goal is not defined. If your number one goal is to build a company then other sacrifices along the way won't necessarily make you unhappy. If your goal was to maintain a happy family and that falls apart, guess what: you will not be happy.
You can make lots of money working 30-35 hour weeks. Perhaps those working 60 hours a week just aren’t as clever, or haven’t found a valuable enough niche.
Like, could I make the same money for half the time if I e.g. started my own gig? Maybe. But maybe is not good enough, and with a spouse, kids and a mortgage, I can't afford to test it - it would put my family at too big of a risk.
Bad data point, plenty of people get divorced whom work regular hours. You’re also making assumptions about the cause of a divorce we frankly know nothing about..
I think this is just cliche Hollywood trope that’s not even true. Most divorces don’t have the husband working too long and not paying attention to family trope. It’s very possible John with normal working hours would still have gotten divorced, most divorces I know didn’t have long working hours as a reason. Marriages go to shit for a large variety of reasons, and not often because husband spent too long working, that is a very small fraction of divorces. There was a time when I judged someone by the fact that they are divorced, but now I don’t anymore. Sometimes she just wants different things and figured that out after marriage, there’s nothing you can do really
I love work. Sometimes I work 50 hours for my full-time employer, and sometimes I work 30 hours for them, and 30 hours for my own side project.
Not everyone loves work as much.
Having the choice to work more or less is good. We should be compensated for whatever value we provide, measured in a way that agrees between employee and employer (or between market and person/business).
> We should be compensated for whatever value we provide, measured in a way that agrees between employee and employer (or between market and person/business).
That is a local optimization that hurts the global output. What is efficient for one individual may be damaging when applied to all society.
Just a theoretical example is that your dedication to work makes you a worse parent, or a non-parent, removing a more knowledgeable, better educated and more healthy human from existing.
It's threatening to equality (wealth disparity) and also social/cultural values (aka work vs. family/neighborhood/community/etc.). These are all important equities, as is enabling high performers to work well. It is apparently difficult to find the right cultural balance that enables maximum achievement and all the rest, too.
I disagree with any top-down pressures to "solve" this tension.
The cultural point is one I hadn't considered before. IIUC, you're saying that if my goal is to work 60 hours a week (for any reason), having 40 hours as the cultural minimum is better than 32.
I haven't asked my employer, but I suspect they would not be willing to allow me to work a 4-day work week, even if I accepted a commensurately lower salary.
You could argue that many developers are a net-negative for society given that the industry wastes a lot of time building X idea in Y language for every combination of Y.
There are lots of people that are not as productive. Fine. But it is the moral part that I have a problem with. They are morally proud that they don't contribute to the society.
"Don't be a burden on others" is one of the values I grew up with. Should be a universally good thing IMO.
I could sit on my ass and play games all day, reek in all the unemployment benefits I possibly could, and still be nowhere near the bottom of net contribution to society.
The amount of social benefits that remain in people’s pockets after the grifters have taken their share are rounding errors compared to say bank bailouts and government subsidies (in the US).
I don’t think being a burden on others is good, but it’s nothing compared to active destruction, which can come with huge force multipliers. Every large organization have high ranked people that are rewarded for their destruction. There are entire industries dedicated to leeching off of honest people, like tax prep and time shares.
Seems like this entire thread is strawmaning in the worst possible way. Where did I say that active destruction is moral good? We can condemn both but my point was explicitly to people that don't contribute to society by moral virtue. Yet others making other flimsy strawmen.
> Even when you are clearly not at your peak, there is always plenty to do that doesn’t require your best, and it would actually be a waste to spend your best time on it.
It really is. I'm finding that there are some menial programming tasks where I really can just turn off my brain and listen to podcasts while I work and almost let my muscle memory take over.
There are also tasks that require my full undivided attention where having anything on in the background breaks my flow and just lengthens the task. When my brain power is low, it's often from working on these particular tasks and when it helps to switch over to one of the menial tasks.
I also do find, as he says, that it's good time to take on some experimental/exploratory tasks that may use more creativity and less logical thinking.
Seeing when you're depleted in one area but not in another is incredibly powerful and is a great productivity booster. (Of course, there are definitely times where I just cannot muster any energy and those are times where it helps to just step away from the keyboard.)
I use my "low energy" time for the more menial tasks, and during those times often my subconscious surfaces useful ideas. This has been so successful for me over the years that I still haven't bothered to learn regular expressions.
I am curious about the practical side of things and who this is for.
So I would like to ask you for a hypothetical allocation of time chunks per day for someone that wants/has a family and a healthy lifestyle (sports, eating healthy...)?
Please include in there: sleeping, cooking, exercising, spending time with your partner and with your kid, paying bills, and making personal decisions.
If the answer is any of these:
- my partner is doing everything
- other people are doing everything else except my work
Then I invite you to think about for whom is this lifestyle then.
I don't understand his argument here. He seems to be arguing against the idea that it's actually impossible to get anything productive done after you've worked a certain number of hours rather than the idea that a company or workforce can be more effective if they work fewer hours.
I can work for 100 hours in a week and get strictly more done than I did in the first 40, and yet I wouldn't be surprised if a company that required 100-hour weeks from its employees became more effective when they reduced their work week to 40 hours.
I can imagine why a person would want to spend more than 40 hours working per week for a limited period of time, but I can't imagine why you would want to stay in that state for a prolonged period of time.
Even if I can be more productive working 9 hour days, so what? I did not get born for being productive.
Long workdays also point at bad planning, lack of proper task delegation or plain old overload. Overload is also bad in the sense that it implies a big backlog, and when you have big backlog, important things get not done.
Fundamentally it's about meaning. People like Carmack find it meaningful to do ambitious projects and push their abilities to the limit. Some goals require more time investment than 40 hours per week.
Obviously not everyone finds that lifestyle appealing, and that's fine. But I don't think it's hard to understand why somebody would spend a lot of time on the thing they truly enjoy doing.
I understand that, but you should probably do your ambitious thing and retire by 40 then. If it takes a whole life, delegation and modest pace are paramount.
Carmack recently started a new company at age 52 with the goal of creating artificial general intelligence. Whether or not that is a realistic goal, I don't think a modest pace is going to maximize his probability of success.
He's not the only one human being on the planet Earth, there's eight billions of us. Somebody else will do it a few months later if he goes to rest and enjoys small things.
You're talking like there is some objectively best way to live life. My point is that meaning is subjective. Maybe for Carmack, resting and "enjoying the small things" would make him less happy than working on projects. Why does your perspective take precedence over everyone else's?
Sure. Training for a marathon puts you at risk of injury. That doesn't mean that everyone who runs a marathon has an injury, or that everyone with ambitious running goals should go relax on the beach instead. Ultimately, there is no objective standpoint from which to say that people should choose different goals, because goals are based on personal subjective values.
>Even ancient Greeks already knew that modesty is the way to go.
Perfect example of the appeal to tradition fallacy.
For majority of people work is a mean to the end. If they know they'll have to spend more time working, they'll fluff it with more not-actually-work to compensate. That's all there is to it.
An extreme natural workaholic will have a hard time understanding it.
John Carmack is someone who has, for the most part, had control of what he was working on. During his work hours, he is working on what he wants to work on.
Yes, in that scenario, the right number of hours to maximize productivity and balance with the other things in life is going to be calculated differently.
But for most people, we are working for an employer. We have nearly no control over what our work will entail. We do not give a single flying rat's behind about that work. We do that work solely because capitalism requires us to do some work, and so we do for survival. In this scenario, the correct number of hours to spend working is as few hours we we can get away with while still drawing a salary.
Yeah, listening to Carmack talk about working life is like listening to CEOs talk about pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. Good for them, but not really applicable to 99% of people.
Not while working for someone else he didn't. The vast majority of people have no choice and there's no guarantee that hard work will pay off. Hell, more often than not, it just means more will be expected of you in the future and when bonus time comes your boss will complain about constrained budgets.
Putting more effort into work doesn't guarantee better results but it certainly could improve the situation for more than 1% of people and to imply otherwise is just as out of touch as a CEO saying "anyone can do it".
Maybe I'm a jaded 44yo at this point, but why would you put your maximum into it unless it's your own business or you have a guaranteed payout for that effort? Not everyone works at a startup, nor are all startups successful.
Look at the big tech layoffs earlier this year - they were letting both the cruft and top tier talent go. Is it easy to say you are truly safe where you are at?
No one will remember or care about your title, your salary, or the effort you put into wherever you work. Your next employer will have no insight into any of that at all outside of your interviews; they'll measure your worth on the job unless you are a world class snowflake.
I'm not saying don't continue to learn and excel! But there's more to life than your day job. Spoken as someone who discovered way too late a proper life/work balance.
When you're in a typical salaried position, it's unlikely that you'll be able to extract more money out of your work proportional to the additional effort you put in.
So the question becomes: what else do you get out of it?
Sometimes that can be learning -- maybe go read stuff that's accessible to you but outside of your typical work area -- but in many jobs that's not really possible.
> So the question becomes: what else do you get out of it?
You nothing. But John, John gets it as share owner. He wants employees to work longer hours because he gets any benefit of it but the employees pay with their health and personal life the price. Externalization is called.
Is it worth putting maximum effort into your job if it causes depression and burnout (making you less effective at your job), makes you sick because of stress (making you less effective at your job), ruins your marriage (making you less effective at your job), and gives you less time to educate your kids (making the next generation less effective at their jobs)?
Human effort is burstable, sort of, but for most people it's taxing to burst up to maximum effort. Apparently this isn't true for Carmack, but I have doubts.
John Carmack is very passionate about what he does and you'd likely have a hard time convincing him not to do it. Case in point is that he's still working despite likely being rich enough not to.
Most people are working jobs they wouldn't necessarily be doing at all if they had some other means of paying the bills. This is who people are talking about when 4 day work weeks come up.
If you complete X amount of work in 5 days, then switch to 4 days and still complete X amount of work, then it seems like you can actually complete X + X/5 in 5 days instead of X.
I'm not arguing how much you should or shouldn't work. I'm just pushing back against the non-sense that people actually accomplish more by working less.
Thought experiment: someone is forced to work 23 hours a day with 1 hour for sleep, 7 days a week. They will likely be fairly productive the first day, but eventually their productivity per day will be zero as they are too tired to function. Over, say, a month, their productivity will be, lets say, 40 hours (wild guess, maybe 20 hours one day, then a scattering the rest of the month).
Now how about who someone works 4 hours a day, 5 days a week. They are likely productive those 4 hours, and able to sustain that the entire month. So they get 80 hours of productive work done, even though they 'worked less'.
Now those are extremes, but literally working less in this case results in higher productivity in the long run. Now where that point is depends on very many variables (including individual biology, social responsibilities, and type of work). But such a point does exist where working more hours results in less productivity.
> This particular article does touch on a goal that isn’t usually explicitly stated: it would make the world “less unequal” if everyone was prevented from working longer hours. Yes, it would, but I am deeply appalled at the thought of trading away individual freedom of action and additional value in the world for that goal.
Am I the only person appalled by Carmack's apparent privilege here? In an era when a CEO is routinely making 300x the wage of an average worker, and sometimes thousands of times more, giving people the option to work less for the same amount of wage seems like one of the few ways we can force the ultra-rich to give back? No one is forcing people to work 7 hours and they could easily work more if they wanted to, but reducing the minimum amount of toil required seems to be a net benefit to everyone who is not insanely wealthy.
Probably one of the most damaging ideas I ever bought into (some time in my late teens) was the idea that people are not generally capable of being productive for more than 35 hours per week, and sustaining it. It seemed true, because I always had trouble working a full work week, even on projects I cared about.
At the tail end of my 20s, I started to realize that this isn't the case, at least for me. I've always found it hard to get work done because I'm low in industriousness, but that can be overcome with routine, minimizing distractions, and knowing when to switch to easier tasks. I don't really know what my limit is, but it's well over 40 hours.
I wish I had listened to more people like John Carmack when I was younger, because maybe I wouldn't have wasted so much of my time over the past decade.
Damaging for what? I agree that it could be damaging for overall productivity, but I would argue that it's very good for other things. Eg. peoples ability to focus on other things in life, like family and friend.
I find it strange that we would want to optimize everything for growth.
I simply was working far less than I actually wanted to. Being good at my craft and producing good work is important and enriching to me. For people with my priorities, it's not good to always be told that we _shouldn't_ work that much. It's not good that John Carmack gets derided for talking about the benefits of working more. "Work less" is such an easy and convenient position to adopt, and it's thrown around in a way that I feel is careless.
I'm not even speaking from the position of someone who wants to work 80 hours a week to the detriment of family and enriching hobbies: I value those things as well. I can work an above average amount if I take time away from social media and watching YouTube videos and Twitch streams, which are things I feel like I've done in excess.
“ my point is purely about the effective output of an individual. If we were fighting an existential threat, say an asteroid that would hit the earth in a year, would you really tell everyone involved in the project that they should go home after 35 hours a week, because they are harming the project if they work longer?”
— doesn’t this depend on the outcome of your work to fight an existential threat? If you fail then going home after 35hrs was exactly the right thing to do (as you’ve optimized for making the most of your remaining time on earth) if your successful then however many hours you spent was worth it.
Surely this entire argument is pointless unless you know the result of the time you spend?
He tells you literally and exactly what he means: his "point is purely about the effective output of an individual". Emphasis is mine on effective output. His opponents argue that there's a peak in productivity, such that if workers wanted the greatest chance at stopping the asteroid, they should choose to only work 35 hours a week. He argues that this peak either does not exist, or is way more than 35 hours.
It makes more sense when you think of salaried vs hourly. Because hourly people are so obviously useful on long hours that companies will pay 50% more to have them there.
I think shorter work weeks are in demand because no one gets to unplug. Work comes at many knowledge workers near 24/7. Night? Weekend? Vacation? Doesn’t matter. Someone higher up the org chart can reach out to you and will expect you to respond. Under that constant bombardment the number of hours actually worked is always going to be greater than regular office hours indicate. To combat this reducing “working days” from 5 to 4 helps keep hours reasonable.
I don't disagree that more work can get done if you work more.
What is being discussed is not "shorter work weeks" but "shorter work days", as many people who do shorter work weeks still work 40 hours a week but do it in less days. It seems that Carmack may actually be in support of that.
Working shorter days is not about maximizing the quantity of work but the quality. It is done when it is undesirable to have any work done that is below a certain quality, or just to increase worker happiness. Many people do their highest quality work after having sufficient rest, and then continue to do well building up context till they are burned out for the day.
It very much depends on the person though as some people gain more relevant short term memory context the longer they have been awake, and are able to create ingenious code in late hours more so than in their morning.
Basically, what it seems Carmack is arguing here is that he wants to get all the possible work out of all employees. Feel free to correct me John if that is not what you mean.
I personally don't find it necessary to extract all possible work from employees, as I respect their free time and personal life. I value happiness of my workers over how much work they get done. Happy workers create better results imo.
I don’t think it’s one size fits all. Carmack mentions some people just have 7 good hours in them a day. But you can’t just think in terms of day by day, even for the same person:
Sometimes I have 60 good hours a week in me, some days more or less than average to get there. I’m obsessed with an idea, driven to complete it.
And sometime I’ve barely got a solid 15 hours in me for the week, maybe for multiple weeks at a time. No simple answer for what leads me there, but the rest of my time is spent working on the absolutely more urgent things that can’t wait and then just trying to fill the other hours with things that aren’t completely useless, learning about current tech trends, trying to find something “shiny” to strike my interest that has at least minimal relevance to my field, etc.
I’m sure that averaged out my workplaces have received the value they paid for in my salary, but there’s peaks and valleys. And sometimes that even includes having a “screw it” day where nothing critical has to get done and I need a mental breather, time to clear my head from the day to day.
But that’s just me. Everyone will be different. Trying to make a universal paradigm of optimized productivity is a waste of effort. The best you might get are some general guidelines and enlightened flexibility.
This isn't really about how productive you are after N hours. It's about how many hours are expected of you.
It's a little disgusting that the only way workers can make a case that reduced demands be placed on them, is by arguing that this would support their employers' interests. The 40 hour workweek was not instituted solely for shareholders' benefit. It was instituted because that's what workers wanted, and they fought for what they wanted, the end. Their interests.
There is work and there is play. If I am "accountable" -- if somebody can smack me for failing, if I need to do it to pay the rent or to fund a retirement -- then it's work. Work demands are pure liabilities. Every rational person seeks to reduce their liabilities.
Once you've met those obligations, that doesn't mean you stop learning or stop accomplishing things. But now you can focus on the things that really seem to matter, that you are really interested in.
This is why people want to reduce their work obligations. Sure, part of it is laziness. Part of the time will be frittered away on YouTube. But some of it will be spent on other, valuable, pursuits.
When I was a kid, I taught myself to program, during summer vacation. Why? Because I didn't have homework.
This is about reducing the amount of time during which you have to do what you're told. This is about human freedom.
Whether productivity, narrowly conceived, goes up or down, does not matter, so long as enough still gets done. Without "enough", the demand will always be for "more, more, more".
If I get paid for working more than 8 hours, I would do it. If working for longer than 8 hours needs to be done, then change the contract, increase the pay.
If I own a company, I would work for as long as it is needed.
Else, it is just a contract. A company thinks you are replaceable anyway. Do not get fooled. They will replace you within 3-4 weeks.
And you do not own anything of the extra work you are doing, it is the company that will take the credits and the profit.
>Okay, let's ignore all them pesky negatives of overworking, like killing a patient from time to time or messing with the wrong piece of data somewhere. Let's also ignore the issue of personal freedom vs. the hours mandated by your employer. Let's focus only on maximizing the total output you can generate. As I understand, this is your case.
This guy's (bustervil) comment nails it.
Carmack on the other hands writes from a position of multiple levels of privilege: the privilege of working on stuff he loves, the privilege of having struck gold early, the privilege of being greatly compensated for it, the privilege afforded by this accumulated wealth to be picky about where he works, the privilege of also being compensated in status for it, the privilege in him being able to set or impose the working conditions for himself, and, last but not least, the privilege of being an employeer (or in some cases, a top level employee managing others). He has also been into those kinds of privilege for over 30 years - almost his entire career.
This is so far removed from the actual working conditions for hundreds of millions in the US, that it's no wonder it shows little understanding or empathy. It even misses the very basic fact that the post/studies talk about the average worker, not the very rare case of "Doing what I love, as someone having a say in what's to be done, and in a state of flow with direct improvement in my bottom line based on the success of the product".
It's like asking for pyramid's master architect concern for the working hours and working conditions of those carrying the rocks on their backs (which can always be disposed and replaced anyway - whereas if someone like Carmack gets out of some gig, it makes the tech news, and might even affect the stock of the company).
> When you hit a wall on one task, you could say “that’s it, I’m done for the day” and head home, or you could switch over to something else that has a different rhythm and get more accomplished.
That’s pretty much what I do. I hit the “enough” on a task because I ran out of brain cycles or just frustration and I go for a walk or pick another task.
Maybe it is the advantage of working from home for a small company but people understand if you’re fried or need to do something else. They know I’ll get it done in the end.
That freedom means I also will be inspired and rush to the computer late at night and have the energy to get something in / done too. Not because they ask me, but because I want to do it.
I saw this quote on some other thread recently on HN that is relevant:
General Freiherr von Hammerstein-Equord, the present chief of the German Army, has a method of selecting officers...: “I divide my officers into four classes as follows: The clever, the industrious, the lazy, and the stupid. Each officer always possesses two of these qualities.
Those who are clever and industrious I appoint to the General Staff. Use can under certain circumstances be made of those who are stupid and lazy. The man who is clever and lazy qualifies for the highest leadership posts. He has the requisite nerves and the mental clarity for difficult decisions. But whoever is stupid and industrious must be got rid of, for he is too dangerous.”
Carmack clearly falls into the clever and industrious bracket and his perspective is skewed by his own disposition.
> it would make the world “less unequal” if everyone was prevented from working longer hours. Yes, it would, but I am deeply appalled at the thought of trading away individual freedom of action and additional value in the world for that goal.
The film "2081" based on the short story "Harrison_Bergeron" depicts such a world, where everyone is forced to be equal, at all cost:
I strongly suspect the reason he can work so much is that he only works on things he finds interesting and doesn't have to answer to anybody.
He doesn't have to take calls and random meetings in the middle of the day.
He doesn't have to work on boring parts of a project. In fact he is known to completely isolate himself from the project and not really communicate at all for long stretches of time. If you look into the Doom3 codebase you will see that the engine is written in C++ while the renderer is written in C. Carmack worked only on the renderer. He didn't even talk to the rest of the team to use the same programming language. They later retrofitted the C renderer to work with the rest of the C++ codebase.
Think about it? In the situation where you pick the part of the project you work on, you choose the tools, you choose the programming language, the computer that you work on, your own hours, your own arbitrary deadlines which you can ignore without much consequence, you can ignore meetings with everybody else and have the meetings on your own terms if needed, would't you also be more productive, happy, and more motivated to work longer hours?
Also, you take home millions and millions in profits as you are the owner of the business.
The trick is not how much you work but on what you work.
1 hour in the right direction is worth an infinity of time in the opposite direction.
So letting your brain rest and melt the direction you should pick is leverage to infinity.
That said, with due respect to his skills; Carmack is also an example of going in the wrong direction; from tick based network, spraycones and headshots, violent games, to energy wasting AI and rockets.
> you don’t stop at 40 hours a week because you think it is optimal for the work, but rather because you are balancing it against something else that you find equally important.
...or because we're social creatures and tend to stick to well-established norms, for all sort of reasons (mostly good, not always). 40-hour weeks are arguably a relatively recent norm at that.
Whatever socially established norm we come up with as the number of hours one is typically expected to work in a full-time job, it's not likely to be the maximally-productive number for every worker, and those like Carmack almost certainly can and do achieve more working much longer hours. But there does seem to be good evidence that for larger samples of workers, reducing from a 40-hour week to 32 or similar doesn't have much of a measurable impact on output (which implies productivity per hour worked has actually gone up considerably).
And, arguably more importantly, workers that have taken part in such programs generally report improvements in their health, sense of self-worth, "happiness" etc. On that basis I'm definitely in favour of revisiting the expectation that a full-time job is ~40 hours a week, and understanding what can be done to help corporations and employees transition to fewer hours.
I actually think the harder problem is: should we extend the current concept of a weekend to be 3 days, or should we accept that the "3rd" rest day each week is different for everyone. I'm generally in the latter camp (*), for various reasons, but I could persuaded that a 3-day weekend, where a significant % of all workers across all industries (including, e.g. schools) all take the same 3 days off each week, has greater benefits.
* strictly speaking I'm in the camp of moving to a 4.5 day week, whereby every worker is expected to negotiate a half-day they won't be available each week with their employer.
There's obviously many factors at play here, a lot of people have mentioned different brain chemistry, interest in the work your doing (which of course also isn't a binary choice, you can enjoy your job but enjoy your personal projects more), etc.. But I think one thing that doesn't get talked about enough is, if I were to try to put it into a word, finality.
I can work for 4-6 hours and be completely wiped. Equally, in the past I've done ludum dares for 24, I seem to remember once even getting close to 48 hours straight, and at the end I'm full of beans (or more so than you'd expect). Again, obviously interest plays a part here but what is much bigger in my opinion is that I know that at the end of that 48 hours, my work is done. I'm "free". If I were to do 48 hours straight at my office job, I'd still be back in the next day, and the day after, and so on.
If the work has no end, what is the motivation to power through it?
John Carmack probably hasn’t worked a full day in this century.
In the 1990s he was one of the most productive people doing what he loved best. And luckily, after only a few years, never had to have a “job”.
For everyone else, there are marginal returns and higher productivity for shorter working hours — even the burger flipper is more productive in a 4 hour shift than an 8 hour shift.
Carmack is clearly talking about "work you care about" in his post. That's not necessarily the work you are paid to do by your employer, though it might be.
Having the mindset that all your talents are equally available to "corporation you" as they are your employer is a key takeaway from Carmack (and others) I think. Even if you are paid to do things you don't care about, save energy for things you do care about and don't limit yourself by thinking of it as "just a hobby" if you really care about it.
When Carmack had a 9-5 coding job he still made games any way he could. The effort he put into that "work" was what really mattered for his success. If he had the mindset that he should only work for the employer and only 9-5 we'd never have heard of him.
We can't all be Carmack but many of us can do better than spending all our effort on something we don't really care about.
Carmack since the 2000s mostly always worked multiple jobs at less than 40hr. Working 30 hours on software at Id and 30 hours at his rocket thing is about like a half-time employee who does a hobby wood working job on the side. At Meta he eventually became part time CTO less than 40 hours and worked on his AI stuff on the side until fully moving to it.
There is some difference in that he was probably doing lots of programming at all the different jobs, rather than an unrelated hobby (maybe not that different than the woodworking analogy though, he began talking about lathing rocket parts a lot), but 40 hours at one place tended to be too boring to him through large parts of his career more than he lets on in that comment, though the AI stuff came later.
There's also a big difference in working on assigned tasks you maybe disagree with vs deciding which tasks are needed, having power of delegation, etc.
He's also a high level grappler. There are a lot of software people at my BJJ gym. I find it uses many of the same skills as programming.
I know it's not a popular sentiment, but I've always just merged work and non-work. Found jobs I enjoyed and eventually became part owner in a company. In 20 some odds years of working, I've never hated a job like I read people here seem to, so maybe I did something right.
Carmack got that 90s hacker grindset. Which I still had... in the 90s. These days it'll take a princely sum to get me to devote more than 40h/week to spinning JIRA tickets into gold. I've got a wife and non-human "kids" now, and they get the cream of my time/love/attention.
Human experience varies way, way too much for there to be a definite answer to this. There are billions of people, and a 100% chance that some people work better with longer hours. Some people love work more than having a family and will happily go without one or get divorced to stay longer at the office. Some people wind up committing suicide because of how oppressive their work is. Some people just naturally have more energy, some less.
At the end of the day, research on the general population can really only give us a good baseline default. It won't be perfect for everyone, but actual, tangible research has shown that on average, less hours at work makes things more productive. That should be our default. When (not if) an individual who isn't compatible with the default comes along, we should just make them not work on the default.
Many of Johns points are sound, as expected, but the entire discussion lacks an overarching context, namely: "what is your goal?". That diverse, foundational variable defines all that comes after.
Deciding not to do something is consequential too, because Opportunity Cost exists whether you like it or not.
Shorter work week doesn't mean you can't work more. People like Carmack (and me) would still fill up most of our lives with "work". But there's a big difference between doing it because you want to and doing it because you have to.
I worked for a little while in a scientific institute. I worked as a programmer but I had to know a bit of the science to do my job. I quickly realised that I would never be truly successful in this field because I just wasn't as into it as others were. For many of the people there the science was their life. Similar to how computers was my life before I worked there. My work could never compete with their passion.
The point of the shorter work week is to stop forcing people to do what they don't want to do for so long.
This smells of someone who has bought into the industry wholesale and has been known to make very unreasonable deadlines throughout all of their projects. Go look at doom on Sega Saturn to see an example but there are two interpretations here
1. He is disconnected from the reality of the situation he is in where he has had total autonomy of something he loves his whole life and cannot understand the concerns of others who are the backbone of his success.
2. He is disingenuous and needs to be a voice to disuate politicians and corporations from implementing something that would negatively impact his bottom line personally.
I'll leave it up to you to think about but either is quite sad for someone who is in a position of power to reduce the suffering of millions of people by just speaking out.
Carmack is an exceptional individual, but when it comes to personal productivity, I truly believe it is a unique thing, where everyone must find something that works for them.
Kind of like taste in music - find what you like, and don't be that asshole that judges others for their taste.
With all due respect: he seems to lack basic empathy and understanding for most office workers.
When you have the viewpoint of the maverick freegunning CEO/main architect, and you have a direct stake at what you do, of course you can switch the tasks up to make everything fresh. After all, no one is going to control you in any way whatsoever.
That does not go for anyone with a well-defined set of responsibilities,placed, say, in an "agile" environment. And besides, working above and beyond your means there just means you get more and more tasks in exchange, nothing else. Yaay?
It’s pretty simple: I can probably squeeze out any number of hours if I’m thrilled by the work. But few or no employers are going to manage to motivate me to do it because as Carmack says “my goals don’t align with my employer’s” or perhaps better put: my employer’s motivation doesn’t align with my motivation.
So yes I’d be as effective with a 30 hour week as a 40 for most jobs. And I totally agree with Carmack: it’s *mostly* a motivational issue. But perhaps that’s a sign I we should just hire more people, pay them 75% to work 30 hour weeks.
For very few labor == leisure, for even fewer labor == leisure == life. If for someone labor != leisure, for whatever reason, then it's a category error [1] to follow this sort of advice.
A much better question should be: why are there so few for which labor == leisure? Why do we attend and attune ourselves to a system in which labor == leisure is such a scarce set and setting?
I don’t think Carmack’s wrong but he should also realize that he is a 7 standard deviation outlier so his brain might not be like others’.
It’s also a question of ROI - it may be a lot easier to spend 12 hours a day programming if you’re literally among the 5 best programmers in the world, the same way practicing basketball is probably a lot more fun for LeBron James than it would be for me. “Oh, that was an enjoyable day! I just solved three open problems in computer graphics!” Rather than “Why is the button still not showing padding on the left?”
The main idea of shorter work weeks is giving back some degree of the control of employee's time rather than forbidding them from working longer hours? Of course, this is not going to work unless you have a good way to enforce this to employers due to power structure. John probably doesn't appreciate this since he owns a nearly full control of his time thanks to his financially independent status, which is a rare privilege across ordinary white collar workers.
Carmack seems to assume that he is not allowed to work overtime. But nobody advocating for shorter work weeks is saying that. You still can work as much as you want, but you don‘t have to. Shorter work weeks would give you more freedom, not less.
But Carmack is also quite privileged in that he got to work on mostly stuff that he wanted to work on. I bet if we all had that (and knew what we wanted to work on, on top of that).. we would work more hours as a result.
When I'm really motivated on something I will work well in excess of 40 hours, perhaps double that, in a week on it and get drastically more done than I would ever have done limited myself to fewer hours.
I think the biggest secret to success/happiness in today's zeitgeist of anti-work ideology is to do just the opposite – work your ass off to the absolute limit. Your brain isn't as weak as the society tells you. Entire state of life becomes awesome and fulfilling. People reward you, they appreciate you, you help them improve their lives, and there is no better feeling of gratitute than be helped by someone that works hard. Ignore society, especially Hackernews mentality. It's not healthy to read this forum where 99% of the comments are anti-work. In a meta way, HN is a great place for me to find what not to do.
Do you really think "anti-work" is the prevailing ideology in Western society? I'd argue the current popularity of "anti-work" sentiment is a backlash to the dominant "work is everything" ideology we've had the last couple of decades.
Today's zeitgeist has taught youngsters to never reach their potential and be perpetually inward looking. The exponential rise of "mental health" industrial complex and "safe spaces" in last 7-10 years is mostly has religious undercurrents and less on anything objective. It makes people misrable and pessimistic. May be the idea is to get them hooked on goverment services? I don't know. I can't steelman it.
I don't have any data to prove, but just speaking from the heart and what I see. There is definitely a need to address extreme issues and occurrences, but there is no way to separate wheat from the chaff and the entire movement has taken on weird self-fulfilling ideology.
Worker rights movements today feel less like the worker rights movements pre-2010. The absolute pinnacle of this is r/anti-work. And lots of it on HN unfortunately.
If you're here looking for optimism, there is none to be found. Cynicism everywhere.
> Your brain isn't as weak as the society tells you. Entire state of life becomes awesome and fulfilling.
To a certain point, I find myself agreeing with this more and more. While I still firmly believe that therapy is extremely useful (if nothing else, it's like an impartial 3rd party you can bounce ideas off of), I think that most people saying they didn't have the energy to do $BASIC_TASK_X are choosing to do so, and lying to themselves. I often will not do something because I feel exhausted, but I'm also acutely aware that it is a choice, and I _can_ do it if I must.
I did a career shift into tech in my 30s via getting a Master's in SWE while I was working nights on a weird compressed shift (4x12, 3 days off, 3x12, 4 days off). It was extremely difficult and in no way healthy, but I did it because it needed to be done. It paid off; got a job before graduating. Immediate salary boost and enjoyment of work.
John Carmack is just right on this. Its non-sensical to claim more work gets done in 32 hours compared to 40. You dont have to be pro overtime to recognize this obvious truth.
Sure, there are diminishing returns. And being tired can make a negative impact. But the “actually a 4 day, 8 hour work week is more productive“ claims is completely self serving bullshit.
Just imagine working 4x 8 hour days. Now ask yourself if you can output anything except negative work on that Friday.
Would you also say it is non-sensical to claim more work gets done in 40 hours compared to 48? Or perhaps 56 hours?
Why is 40 some magical number to productivity? What if 40 hours leads people to padding out their day with extra bullshit like meetings or needless admin that ends up sucking away more of the time they could spend on their actual work than if they never had to pad things out by only working 32 hours?
For transparency I live in [redacted] where the standard work week is 35 hours. Also I've never found the [redacted] with their 35 hour work week are less productive than our friends in Asia with 45+ hour work weeks. Regardless of time worked the productivity output is roughly the same for any given week.
> Would you also say it is non-sensical to claim more work gets done in 40 hours compared to 48? Or perhaps 56 hours?
Absolutely. Because all you have to do is not produce negative work beyond 40 hours. You can literally do nothing.
As I said, there is a balance to be struck and diminishing returns are a real thing. But in order for a 4 day work week to be more productive than a 5 day work week then that means your work output on the 5th day is negative.
> But in order for a 4 day work week to be more productive than a 5 day work week then that means your work output on the 5th day is negative.
You are assuming equal productivity (per working hour) in both scenarios. However, it just might be that the worker who just came off a 3-day weekend, and knows they only have to work for 4 days before their next break, will be more productive per hour than someone who just came off a 2-day weekend, and who knows they will need to work for five days before their next break.
Basically, you are assuming that people are robots and get a certain amount of work done per hour regardless of circumstances.
As metabagel said you seem to be basing this on every hour in a persons working week being equal which is obviously not how things really work out.
Do you not find yourself more mentally and physically fatigued at ~35 hours compared to ~25 into the work week?
When do you do your best work? At the start of the work week? Middle? End? Do you feel you do better work after you've had more down time to let your brain "decompress" or whatever you want to call it?
As far as I can tell we stumbled into the ~40 hour work week a long time ago due to physical exhaustion and that exhaustion led to more mistakes and productivity impact due to assembly lines being held up to correct those mistakes, etc.
This makes sense to me and seems like a pretty understandable and reasonable upper limit when it comes to physical jobs such as assembly lines and such.
Why do we just assume that ~40 hours transfers over to knowledge worker jobs? We all know how mentally fatiguing it is after several hours of debugging a tricky issue or trying to design a modern scalable architecture.
Whereas a mistake on an assembly line from a fatigued worker at 40+ hours into the week may put the assembly line out of action for a few hours it that is usually it for the negative impact.
Mistakes in a platform design or a silly bug can easily lead to constant productivity impact and huge costs down the road if that mistake makes it into production. We see it all the time with technical debt.
In your opinion how many hours per working week strikes your balance? How did you get to this number and do you think it is specific to you or more of a general figure that should be the standard?
I’ve found that 5 x 6 is roughly as productive for me as 5 x 8. 4x8 would be a drop, no doubt. I’ve got approximately 6 good hours per day, and then I’m just not bothering. When I’m really in the flow, I can pull 10 hour days, but that’s fairly rare.
Also, the long term impact on my happiness and well-being can take a while to measure.
I agree that the limiting factor is more about hours per day. Than days per week.
So when working 8 hours instead of 6, there are 2 additional hours where you accomplish nothing? What are you doing? Also consider that even if you aren’t accomplishing anything it doesnt mean you’re getting less work done.
Like I said I recognize there are diminishing returns. But it doesnt make sense to claim you’re actually getting less done.
You’re making some incorrect assumptions. Why do you find it impossible that you can be more productive with 5x6 than 5x8 because you’re more well rested?
If you do 10 work units per hour at 5x6, and you do 6 work units per hour at 5x8 because you're worn out, then 5x6 is more productive.
Your mistake is thinking that the first 6 hours of 5x6 and 5x8 are equally productive. Maybe that’s true. Maybe it isn’t. But to claim that it definitely is and anyone who thinks otherwise doesn’t have common sense is just silly.
Edit: to further clarify, are you claiming that 5x10 is definitely more productive than 5x8? What about 5x16? What about 5x24. Or 7x24? Your confidence that you’re definitely right that 5x8 is better than 5x6 makes me wonder where you know the ideal line is and how you know that.
Day 1: 16 hours, 16 work units
Day 300: 16 hours, 2 work units
Burnout comes in when your pace is unsustainable. We are debating where the sweet spot is. Maybe it's 8 hours a day for you. Maybe it's 10 for Carmack. Maybe it's 6 for me. I don't know, but I doubt it's as obvious or linear as you seem to be thinking.
I thin what Carmack is saying here makes sense if all you care about is productivity. But the two salient things to this discussion are, to me, first that the vast majority of people do not/can not work on something they genuinely care about (since work is allocated by capital, not personal preference or even democratic decision making) and, secondly, productivity has increased steadily for decades while compensation has remained flat. Given that second thing in particular, I think any ordinary worker, working for a wage, is stupid for not trying to claw back some of those gains, either via a shorter work week, more wages, more socialism, whatever.
When I look at that diverging productivity/compensation curve I wonder how workers in this country were so comprehensively subdued.
I recently read that George Washington was often frustrated that his slaves would not work hard and needed to be constantly watched and threatened to be productive. This reminds me of that.
If you have completely misaligned economic incentives you should expect misaligned performance from your employees. A founder or executive stands to reap so much more from their effort. Expecting someone to give up large amounts of their time in the prime of their life for mediocre pay on a project that they have little to no agency over is crazy.
It amazes me how angry capitalists get when the employees act like capitalists.
If you only have seven good hours a day in you, does that mean the rest of the day that you spend with your family, reading, exercising at the gym, or whatever other virtuous activity you would be spending your time on, are all done poorly? No
I want to hear what Carmack's wife and kids think.
There's definitely a trade off... that he doesn't acknowledge that indicates to me that his own priorities entirely involve work.
"Although John Carmack is a multimillionaire, and his company brings in close to $20 million a year, he is still a self-described workaholic. "I still work 80 hours a week," he admitted to Mark Lisheron of the Austin American-Statesman. "It used to be 80 hours on software, now it's 40 hours on software and 40 hours on Armadillo." Carmack did ease up a bit after he and his wife, Anna Kang, had their first child in 2004—he was getting home from the office at about midnight instead of 2:00 AM or 3:00 AM. Kang, however, insists that Sunday is family day, so Carmack compromises by reading technical manuals to his infant son. "
Unclear how relevant this is given it's age but it's the closest public information you'll find.
Every time I read those type of comments from workaholics, I remember the article on top 5 regrets of hospice people [1]. I think that the age to burn the candle is between 18 and 30 or 35 at most. After that,fuck it, people should live their lives with their means, and work should only be enough to bring food and shelter to home.
That list was compiled anecdotally by a single person, so I think we should take it with a huge grain of salt. It could be subject to confirmation/selection/reporting bias. For all we know, there could just as many or more people dying satisfied with their work accomplishments, or wishing they had worked harder.
>work should only be enough to bring food and shelter to home
What if you take the thing you love doing and make it your life's work?
To each one it's own I guess. I have been crazy passionate about computers for 30 years. Learnt on a Commodore with logo for kids My first computer had GWBASIC and I spent years and years of my life doing so many exciting thing with computers (i even got PHD!!)
But at 41 years old, my priorities have changed. I still get super excited by tech, that's why I advise startups in exchange of equity (so basically for free) and my day job is pretty neat as well (I play with ML, NLP, GPT and other AI technologies) .
But long gone are my days of working 10+ day hours. I sincerely prefer other way less technical stuff in life. I'm visiting my parents quite often, and enjoy spending a lot of time with my wife and kids.
Maybe my previous comment sounded very authoritative, but I just meant to convey my point of view. I have friends who have been working on their startups (as CEOs) like crazy for more than a decade, and they seem to like it.
Personally I just cant see myself wishing I had worked more in my deathbed. Specially for other people LOL. Naaah ,as I've grown older, I've learned to appreciate more the "earthly" things in my life.
What his comment is missing is that in families where both parents work outside of the home doing a job they are passionate about and would like to spend more time doing, they almost always are not able to work as much as they would like to, either on their actual work, or on side projects. I would love to only have to work 32 hours per week at my current salary and have one day per week to myself when the kiddo is in school. Sometimes I would use this to do "work" (maybe working on things I don't have time to get to in my day-to-day, learning new skills, having and working on side-projects), other times I would use the time to work on the house, do yard work, and other times I might go for a hike, or just sleep. Consistently having time to do activities like these would make me a better worker when I am at work, and a better parent and spouse when I am at home.
Yeah, I mean every job and person is different. But as a blanket claim I think it's bogus and John's article seems to be pushing back against that in favor of a more nuanced perspective.
It's Carmack, though. He's so far out of the ordinary, I can't take any of his claims in this regards seriously. He's the outlier, and it's difficult from that position to write about what the average worker might be like.
I'm not sure that John Carmack, someone who's known for his legendary coding ability and work ethic, is going to be representative of most engineers / programmers out there. The term 10x gets thrown around a lot to the point of banality, Carmack is actually one of those 10x humans.
I think the split on these conversations isn't usually between extremely effective people and not-very-effective people, it's usually between people who aspire to be more effective/get more done, and people who think that par is fine.
The discussion in the original post is responding to "Why working fewer hours would make us more productive". We're talking about how to be more productive in general.
2) His general admiration of Elon Musk and positive opinion of a man who flagrantly and regularly violates the very societal norms that have provided him with the opportunities he built his life around.[0]
3) His inability to navigate Facebook/Meta to effect the change he felt was necessary [1]
4) "My core thesis is that the federal government delivers very poor value for the resources it consumes, and that society as a whole would be better off with a government that was less ambitious." (I should have known about this but didn't until relatively recently) [2]
5) The comment he made as the topic of this submission; he's completely out of touch with reality for anyone who isn't him, but doesn't seem to care at all or even really understand what other people might want.
John Carmack's way of thinking is useful for people who want to directly create things themselves, and who don't trust or can't figure out how to motivate or incentivize people to amplify their work.
When I was like that, John Carmack was my hero. Now I realize that to be the most effective version of myself, I need to have relationships with others who make me even better than I could possibly be alone. For that, John Carmack is not a good person to look up to, as he doesn't seem to be capable of growing his reach beyond himself.
So he's not my hero, he's someone I look at and now see all of the flaws that may have already been there, but weren't relevant for the time I valued him as an inspiration.
He knows Elon personally. You know him from media narratives and too online envious activists that desperately want a villain. Spaceman bad. He makes us look like slackers! We want collapse and revolution, he wants to pull civilization into an era of sustainable energy and reusable rockets and maximized freedom.
I'll defer to Carmack's personal experience on this one.
Because the government has restrictions placed on it by the people that private sources of welfare do not. Want to have something to eat? Listen to us proselytize our religion to you for the next hour. Oh, and by the way, our religion requires you to give 10% of what you earn to us.
Ironically he invalidates his whole point in the second sentence by admitting that there is indeed such a thing as overwork. The rest is an argument that underwork is a thing, which no one denies.
So its really just a debate on ideal hours and the post fails to make an argument there.
1. He doesn't invalidate any of his points in the way you think he does
2. In the most generous interpretation of your reading of him, he frames that amounts over the average 40 hours as sometimes being "underwork", which is absolutely something the some of the "overwork" camp denies
He might have good points, or he might have bad points, but either way it's not because of your additions to the discussion just now. (i.e. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.)
Please don't cross into personal attack on HN and please don't post unsubstantive/flamebait comments. You can make your substantive points without any of that.
From the HN guidelines: Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
I don't think Carmack would deny that overwork exists for knowledge workers. He admits that anyone can have a peak and not be at it. I don't think Carmack would deny that a knowledge worker can be overworked and increase their bug output, for example. I do not believe anything I've said is against a strawman.
The strawman is reducing his comment to "really just a debate on ideal hours and the post fails to make an argument there."
It's not about ideal hours at all. I'll post the entire comment here for anybody that might not have clicked through so you can actually decide what it's about.
Quoting Carmack:
I find these “shorter work weeks are just as effective” articles to be nonsense, at least for knowledge workers with some tactical discretion. I can imagine productivity at an assembly line job having a peak such that overworking grinds someone down to the point that they become a liability, but people that claim working nine hours in a day instead of eight gives no (or negative) additional benefit are either being disingenuous or just have terrible work habits. Even in menial jobs, it is sort of insulting – “Hey you, working three jobs to feed your family! Half of the time you are working is actually of negative value so you don’t deserve to be paid for it!”
If you only have seven good hours a day in you, does that mean the rest of the day that you spend with your family, reading, exercising at the gym, or whatever other virtuous activity you would be spending your time on, are all done poorly? No, it just means that focusing on a single thing for an extended period of time is challenging.
Whatever the grand strategy for success is, it gets broken down into lots of smaller tasks. When you hit a wall on one task, you could say “that’s it, I’m done for the day” and head home, or you could switch over to something else that has a different rhythm and get more accomplished. Even when you are clearly not at your peak, there is always plenty to do that doesn’t require your best, and it would actually be a waste to spend your best time on it. You can also “go to the gym” for your work by studying, exploring, and experimenting, spending more hours in service to the goal.
I think most people excited by these articles are confusing not being aligned with their job’s goals with questions of effectiveness. If you don’t want to work, and don’t really care about your work, less hours for the same pay sounds great! If you personally care about what you are doing, you don’t stop at 40 hours a week because you think it is optimal for the work, but rather because you are balancing it against something else that you find equally important. Which is fine.
Given two equally talented people, the one that pursues a goal obsessively, for well over 40 hours a week, is going to achieve more. They might be less happy and healthy, but I’m not even sure about that. Obsession can be rather fulfilling, although probably not across an entire lifetime.
This particular article does touch on a goal that isn’t usually explicitly stated: it would make the world “less unequal” if everyone was prevented from working longer hours. Yes, it would, but I am deeply appalled at the thought of trading away individual freedom of action and additional value in the world for that goal.
You conveniently ignored the part that modern work is not only about coding, it is a lot about collaborating, politics, reviewing and writing bunch of non-sense paperwork, policies, manuals etc.
I wouldn't mind to work long hours if that would mean purely coding.
But no, employers prefer to throw bunch of non-coding tasks at engineers and introduce politics, the more higher up the chain you go and the more impact you want to make.
If you let me code and get stuff done, I will happy do it.
However if you require me to create dumb paperwork, track JIRA tickets, create reports about reports, demand using the latest TPS REPORT cover on all my deliverables - you will get 9-to-5 PERIOD
> I wouldn't mind to work long hours if that would mean purely coding. But no, employers prefer to throw bunch of non-coding tasks at engineers
You can’t have it both ways. If you want to just code, call yourself a coder or programmer.
An “engineer” is of a profession devoted to “the application of science and mathematics by which the properties of matter and the sources of energy in nature are made useful to people.”
Making your work useful to people involves communication and research beyond coding. Maybe it ain’t jira tickets but it also ain’t “purely coding.”
It is not even engineering.
A lot of software devs have become slaves on the alter of Agile software development. A senseless machine that only cares about the number of your JIRA tickets, and making sure your agile shibboleths like standups, retros, sprints and etc are conducted.
You can look at gogle - the company that has never produced any useful product beyond a few of search/ads, youtube, gmail, and maybe google docs. Thats it. Nothing more.
and gogle is considered very efficient in its engineering processes, that entire industry copies it.
meanwhile the most disruptive innovation comes from small teams that dont care about formalized rituals and jsut focused on execution and coding, they dont need PM, TPM, and Agile Coach, and Engineering manager to deliver value
Ya I think you make a fair point that a lot of non coding work these days probably doesn’t actually improve the product/make it work better for the end user.
I see that as simply bad management, and there is indeed a ton of it. Keep in mind that agile began as a reaction to “waterfall” and was intended to reduce bureaucratic overhead and planning. But the reaction became worse than what it was reacting to.
I think throwing out all process will just lead us back to bad process. Better to have a good process - some sort of planning and system for improvement is good and necessary IMO. Especially if you’re building an organization or iteratively improving product. v1 can arguably be done seat of the pants but what about subsequent versions.
John Carmack's experience of engineering isn't a bunch of meetings, customer-alignment sessions, or anything else though. Apocryphal stories of him measuring everytime he was interrupted are the antithesis of that: they imply he wasn't available to staff, wasn't coordinating with anyone - he was in fact, just coding.
How many people have jobs where "just coding" is actually adequate to do the job? The early years of game development are perhaps the only time this was relevant, and even then it only applies if you work for yourself and not salary.
When 16 hours a day of coding will pop out a game engine a little faster, which gets it to market faster, which gets money into your bank account faster - sure, go nuts. The monetary value of your output is potentially highly disproportionate to the hours input and you the only stakeholder is you.
Of course, if you're spending a stupid number of hours a day coding and disregarding leading your art department, or guiding your other developers, or negotiating with your publishers for funding or deadlines...then you're probably not actually doing your job.
Yeah I used to be a huge contributor of discretionary effort, back when the job was fun. My current agile job is such a chore though that I can't wait to finish for the day.
Im not an enthusiast and really balance work life balance but I get more done when working 9 hours instead of 8. That shouldn’t be a controversial take.
Whether thats worth it or if employers can reasonably expect it is another matter. But absolutely more work gets done. This is a topic where the reddit and hackernoon takes are comically extreme sometimes.
Yep and I am going to get more done in 5 days than 4. Maybe this doesn't play out over a large group but I just find it hard to apply those articles about the 4 day work week actually being more productive to my personal experience.
> those articles about the 4 day work week actually being more productive to my personal experience.
They are conflating diminishing returns with less total work and it leads to ridiculous propositions. If you can get more work done in 4 days it means the 5th day of work is a negative output.
This is a fundamentally false binary. There are absolutely loads of people who are both of those things, usually due to their enthusiasm for their day job being matched by their enthusiasm for other things.
Am I expected to expend my enthusiasm for programming on my employer?
I find it insulting that I must be a "nine to fiver" if I advocate for labor. My passion isn't building what my boss wants, it's building what _I_ want.
This implies that accepting a job that pays more, even if it doesn't align with your incentives, is being a "nine to fiver", which I disagree with.
Innate to our economic system is the tension between labor and employer. Us as laborers want a higher share of the profit from our labor. Employers seek the opposite, and "fulfillment" provides them the means to extract it.
Consider the wages of game developers, which have stagnated compared to less "fulfilling" SWE work, because employers are able to supplant higher pay with work that people are passionate about. If being a "nine to fiver" prevents me from falling into that trap, so be it.
> Ideally your incentives get aligned such that you're not spending your enthusiasm on your employer, but on yourself via your employer.
If the "via" here is "by giving me money to do what I want", then I agree. GP is arguing that fulfillment from work is necessary to be an enthusiast, thus the assumption that your response is related.
Even in the purely financial scenario though, aren't the incentives still in conflict? If both you and your employer's incentive is "earn as much money as possible", then you are both vying for the same pool of profit.
> You should be invested in the success of the people who you work for, financially (or whatever you value).
Bullshit. They are trying to make millions for themselves, not me.
I'm trying to make millions for myself through my SaaS that I work on nights/weekends.
If they want to give me founding ownership of their company then I'll reconsider, but otherwise I'm just going to do the work assigned. I'm not going to be enthusiastic or care if it succeeds. I'll just do the work to the best of my ability, and then save the rest of my energy for my business, not theirs.
> They are trying to make millions for themselves, not me.
Why not both?
> If they want to give me founding ownership of their company then I'll reconsider
Now you're getting it, though the "founding" part seems unnecessary. If the money is what drives you, then get a cut. But once you do, your incentives will be aligned and if money really was the issue, then you should be motivated to work whatever hours are needed.
If money wasn't the issue, then incentives weren't aligned correctly.
If you're salaried and you too often work more than nine to five, then you are necessarily devaluing your work. I don't see how devaluing yourself aligns your incentives with the company's incentives, whose incentives are to clearly get as much work done for as little money as possible.
the current meta game is: you work over-time to deliver more and exceed expectations, then you get promotion and +money
if you don't expect promotion, then there is no incentive to over-work and overdeliver.
This is how modern tech companies get ahead of legacy corps: hire young high energy and high capability folks, and let me compete with each other for tiny pool of promotion money. As a result everyone will overwork, but you have to pay only to a few who gets promoted.
Please do not take advice on cognitive science, personal health, finance or relationships from renowned experts who have found immense success in entirely different fields of knowledge.
John Carmack is a very intelligent person who can teach you a lot about many extremely complex engineering-related matters.
Applying his advice on health and work-life balance without a full understanding of the many variables that skew his perspective and his own daily life is probably a bad idea.
Expertise is not automatically domain-transferable. Anyone claiming otherwise is suffering from hubris, or star-struck.
To be honest he is very much commenting about his roam of experience and not as research article but as a personal comment on HN. This should be allowed and should not be discredited as such (as this comment is a comment on the OP and not on someone saying that this comment should be generalized). Being in such an environment with some other obsessed researchers around me and the European court ruling that requires work documentation to be enforced just published. I understand the direction of the comment although I think it can only be applied to very limited situations. The argument seems to be like: do not regulate or discredit drugs because there is some people successfully self optimise with them knowingly taking certain risks...
If I do focused mental work for even seven hours I'm completely wiped. I absolutely can't read a normal book at that point. Clicking the next meme on reddit is about all I can manage. And yeah, my wife and kids aren't getting a lot from me on those days.
I'm surprised that Carmack seems to find this absurd. Am I super atypical? Or is he? I'm actually curious: after let's say 5 hours of in-person interviews, do most people come home and fire up the CAD software to work on rockets or whatever, like Carmack, or do they hang out on the couch vegetating and feeling like they have a minor hangover or head cold, like me?