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.
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.