[ktamura]

I agree on both. Honestly, much of my long hours were due to my inexperience rather than supernatural productivity. If I were to do the same work with what I know now, I'd do it very differently with far fewer hours (probably).

That said, the point OP was making is that in a startup origin story, there's a significant perception gap between those who actually moved the needle and those who claim to have done so. Those who actually drove the bus and those who rode it. Time and again, I've seen the latter people take advantage of the relative reticence of the former.

It's probably more like, "relative to this guy who tried to kill my company early on and later claimed undue credit for its founding, this dedicated early employee surely seemed like she worked 20+ hour days and sacrificed everything for me."

[bonesss]

> ... much of my long hours were due to my inexperience rather than supernatural productivity.

It takes a fair bit of experience with long days to know that the feeling of doing work and doing 'stuff' pales in comparison with the productivity of doing that work well while rested and focused...

Overtime creates 'undertime', cleaning up tired mistakes takes longer than doing them, and when it comes to coding nothing is worse than wasting 15+ hours implementing something you didn't think clearly enough about to start with, and realizing it was all wasted/could have been done in 1.

> this dedicated early employee surely seemed like she worked 20+ hour days

I feel the discussion of this line is perhaps conflating "worked 20 hour days [on the rare occasion something crazy was happening]", vs "worked 20 hour days [from 0400 hours to midnight every day]". Just because someone worked some 20 hour days does not mean they worked 20 hours every day :)

[biztos]

Yeah, perception is a big part of it.

When I was in startup-land, if we had a big deliverable we'd work until we couldn't work, which usually was about noon to 8am. Then everyone would go home and sleep it off, and the next day we'd try to not do that again... sometimes successfully, sometimes not.

Now that I have a "normal" job, I still occasionally do a big coding sprint of 20 hours or more, but I don't do it day after day.

In startup land, when the CEO came in at 7am and saw us frenetically coding away in the Nerd Loft, I sure hope he told everyone we all worked 20-hour days. :-)