I don't believe anyone really does 80 hours. I just don't think it is possible and I don't think you can call sitting at a desk doing nothing "work".
I've done 60 hours during intense periods just fine... but it was only effective because of the nature of the work I was doing at the time. And, I usually took a break down the road to compensate. In no way was it even 50% creative work.
4 to 6 creative hours seems right, but a lot of work isn't creative. There is also the bullshit work that still has to get done, ie, loading up contacts in a CRM, building and nurturing relationships, reviewing emails, checking links, etc etc etc..
Most of my work weeks clock in around 50-60 hours regularly. It's pretty simple how this happens. It's meetings all day and then once meetings are over it's email, documents, admin paperwork, training etc...
Here's an example of just last Thursday which was busy but was at least not double booked and had some times I could stop and go to the bathroom, I also wasn't traveling this day which was good:
8-12 - US Senate Staff Delegation and budget review
12-1 - Software Requisition Review
1-2 - Infrastructure planning meeting
2-3 - Conference call with colleague in HI
3-4 - Meeting with an LP
4-5 - Talking with my Deputy and Admin
5-7 - Meeting with Army Futures
7 - Dinner
8-10 - Emails, Award review for employees, look over presentations due in Jan/Feb
Now, almost none of that work is creative because I'm not in a creative job anymore really. I am an executive with a 200 person data engineering and data science team building the future way the DoD builds and runs software.
That's how you get to these hours.
I'd also suggest that "Building and nurturing relationships" isn't "Bullshit work."
I have strong feelings on this and am almost afraid to post because of, I suppose, the stigma of being a hard worker. But this is what I’ve seen & experienced:
1. Hours worked & productivity are interrelated variables but they do not equal each other. So you have to explore the other variables involved in your productivity equation if you want to control effects on productivity.
2. The brain works on solving big problems even when you’re not actively focused on it. Anyone who experiences the effect of coming back to a problem they were beating their heads on for a while and quickly figured out a path forward has experienced this first hand.
3. If you’ve bought into this, then also consider that your output is solved problems. That’s what other people will see about your work. If the outcome is that you stayed at the office for 12 hours solving a problem, versus at work for 6 hours, said f this, went home, came back the next morning and worked the problem out in an hour, then what was the difference?
You kinda keyed in that a lot of work is not creative, so I think that kinda fits into this framework too. I find that doing rote work is a nice warm up or wind down block of time. So having scheduling awareness can help boost your productivity. But yeah for all of that, I’ve never been able to buy into the idea that 60/80 hour work weeks are at all a necessary idea, or a very proper one either. And this is how I’ve tried to make myself feel better that I could never personally do that kind of time, lol.
The fact is that the nature of work changes at the c level. You are no longer doing any actual work yourself. You don’t prepare specifications, do analysis or any other for of work that you might recognize from before. You won’t touch any Microsoft products yourself. Your team does this. You are responsible for hiring people to build that team for you, so even people management is delegated to a large extent.
Most of your work is being present, either in meetings or work functions. These will include breakfast lunch and dinner, and something all three on the same day.
Your main focus is communication. This work extends to working within your own departments, the company, the rest of senior management, government, share holders, banks etc.
Most of your hours are not effective. You write them off. It’s understanding that you only have 10 hours a week of effective hours out of 80 hours and making sure those hours are actually effective.Effective time will be 5 minutes in an hour most likely.
That said some people are really good at juggling all of this bs, and some people are really terrible.
We can talk about different approaches and what works and what doesn’t, but it doesn’t change the fact that the 80 to 100 hour work week is real for a lot of people in that position.
I think it's possible but probably not sustainable. Nick Winters did a 120-hour programming/game-dev workweek and filmed it so you could see if he was cheating: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0qlr22cF14
I'm also open to the possibility that might be a very small percentage of people who could do it and that I might just not be one of them.
I'm also open to the possibility that I've been conditioned to expect 40 hour work weeks and that's why I may not be able to do much more. Apparently it's common for students in China to attend school for 12 hours a day. Perhaps if I'd been raised in a similar environment it would be easier to focus for longer?
It does happen, but generally in environments that are different from the 'normal' workplace - environments that contain a sense of community, where breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and sometimes evenings and sleeping are part of the job: grad school, hospitals, fieldwork, law/consulting/IB firms, etc. It seems like the mid-decade tech ideal was to import that kind of workplace style.
And you're right, that those hours are not all 'at the desk working', but they are still most definitely working hours when you're waiting for a page, an email, or a piece of data that require immediate response at 3am.
That kind of work can be deeply rewarding (in retrospect), but is very clearly damaging if it persists for too long.
A lot of surgeons have 80 hour workweeks. This is especially common is smaller hospitals in rural areas. It's not all surgery, but they're definitely not sitting at their desks and doing nothing. Before regulations, it was not uncommon for some doctors to work over 100 hours because they were in such high demand.
Ive done it. It was a startup, but not explicitly a tech company. We legitimately got to work at 7:30 every day and left at 9:00 7 days a week for several weeks.
Obviously unsustainable, but easily one of the most enjoyable periods of my work life. Everybody was helping doing everybody else’s job. It was really fun.
> I don't believe anyone really does 80 hours. I just don't think it is possible
That's a weird thing to believe. I saw it all the time when I worked in finance (but I was capped at 60 hrs, which I did routinely), and it seems pretty par-for-the-course for my friends who are doctors and lawyers.
I don't think it's healthy, but it's certainly done.
I’m confused. You say you don’t believe anyone does 80 hours and then you seem to add a qualifier to define work as that which is creative or meaningful.
To your first statement, it is possible and very common in law and investment banking, so it’s easy to dispel that misconception for you. I worked in investment banking for years and there were dozens of people on my floor which was one of dozens of floors pulling 70-90 hour weeks routinely. There is some % of an 80 hour week lost in transition (sitting at a desk waiting for feedback on a book that needs to go to printing by 4am for the 8am meeting) but you have no choice but to be there and at any moment you have to be prepared to act on whatever next step is required.
To your second point: was this work deeply creative or meaningful? To me it was. Perhaps less creative than technical. As for meaning, that depends. We would routinely work on projects that had 9-figure dollar impact on companies with tens of thousands of employees. Our numbers determined the fates of thousands of employees and hundreds of thousands in their supply chains. Today I manage over 50 people, while I have a more direct human impact now than I did then, my impact today is a fraction of what it was when our teams changed the course of companies from a little Excel spreadsheet.
If you find something you love doing and can do it in the way you want, 80 hours isn't bad at all if you're otherwise unencumbered.
I did a 7 month stretch where I was working from home, on my own schedule, doing what I loved, and was doing 15-18 hour days 6 days a week (~90-100/week), while still managing to have/cook dinner and a bit of downtime with my now-wife each day, plus a full day off. It was fantastic.
Once the product was live the work shifted just so slightly from pure create/build to maintenance/improvements, going into the office a couple of days a week, and suddenly even 60 hours felt like a lot, and eventually it was just a job and I was doing 40-45.
I think it's more a matter of finding the right thing and schedule for you rather than imposing some kind of convention onto it.
I did a few years of 80 hours, but that was as a medical resident / fellow. There is a lot of creativity in medicine (especially thinking adversarially to try to reduce premature closure on a diagnosis), but even then certainly we’re not being creative for all 80 hours a week.
I work in IT Security. I do 2-4 pentests a week. I shouldn’t, but I work for a small firm and don’t have much control. I easily do 80 hours a week. If I don’t we don’t get enough done, we bleed clients, and I worry about clients getting hacked. I should not work 80 hour weeks, I do not think it should be possible, but I definitely work 80 hour weeks and I am not wasting time. I do web app pentests, network and infrastructure pentests, and emergency response when they need help, and that is easily an 80 hour week. Maybe 5-10 hours of that is meetings. The rest is legitimate work.
Sometimes the hard part of the job isn't the number of hours per week at a desk but the need to always be on call to deal with problems. For me, being on call leads my brain into thinking about potential problems ahead of time, so there's a low level of work-related background noise going on all the time anyway.
I can tell you that I worked 80 hours a week for several months and while it is not effective, it was "necessary" for the business to survive. I had 4-6 hours per day that were really effective (if even), the others were just there to get simple stuff done, which was necessary to meet deadlines.
Would I do it again? Absolutely not, because it is simply bad management. But I can imagine how easy it is to get stuck in such a work environment. Or people might think "when it is working once, it will work all the time". The truth is that if the deadlines and work would have been planned better it would easily be achievable in 40 hours.
The problem is that some startups are super chaotic, overpromise, underdeliver without even thinking about how long something takes.
It’s definitely possible to work 80 hrs of real work per week. I’ve done it myself. Your mistake is probably underestimating how diverse people’s values are. If you have a strong enough reason why, working non stop is fulfilling (especially when it becomes habit).
I just took a single 29-hour workday, right before a major deadline. And coming up to that, didn't have a single off day whole December, typically working from 2pm to 4am. So yeah, it's definitely possible, but really not good for anyone in the long run.
Totally agree with this. To give an example, in the months ahead of launching .app (which I was the tech lead of), I was pulling some 50-60 hour work-weeks vs a typical 40. That was exhausting and definitely the maximum I was capable of pulling (talking about actual hours of work here, not just hours spent in the office). Plus, post-launch, I took things easy for a couple months to recover.
My experience is ~4 of productive creative work per day. I can go to 6-8, but that gets drawn out to a 12-14h workday. 4h is where Im happiest and most productive. I dont force it.
A few thoughts to add to the discussion, loosely related:
1) If I know exactly where to spend my time for the best rate of return, its likely that I'll have to spend relatively few hours achieving success.
2) For most people, the success they can achieve through just having a plain old job can be had for a mere 40 hours. Anything they want above what 40 hours can grant them should probably be done elsewhere (second job, side-hustle, etc) since the ROI will be very low for spending those additional hours at work.
3) The 80 hour week lifestyle is probably necessary for people who are still frantically doing what Felix Dennis calls "The Search", trying to build a company without the foggiest notion what people want.
"For creative work, you can't cheat. My believe is that there are 5 creative hours in everyone's day. All I ask of people at Shopify is that 4 of those are channeled into the company."
5 creative hours in a day absolutely matches my experience based on my own career. I can get a HUGE amount done in those 5 hours if I apply them sensibly.
I agree and regarding 3) would you put most startup founders into this bucket? In reading Peter Thiel Zero to One I was struck by his point that real power law focus in a startup means you're doing something new, thus "The Search" is a required first step even if it's not your first rodeo.
These successful people sound like working long hours is an absolute evil. I think they underestimate the effort that an ordinary person needs to be even moderately successful. What if it takes me twice as long to debug a problem as my team's standard? What if a concept is so simple to everyone else in my team yet it's just so hard for me to understand? What if I see an opportunity to build a truly great product, yet I don't have the required technical background while I have at most two weeks to catch up? What if I really want to tap into machine learning yet I have meetings all day, so my only choice is to study after work? Now, before you ask me to switch my career, what if I do have a passion in tech and I'm even worse at doing anything else?
See? Working long hours sometimes is not a burden, but a choice, a choice that one makes to master what they love, and to make sure they won't regret wasting their life when looking back years later. And sometimes working long hours, as long as it's voluntary, is the only way to succeed.
The whole argument is not about temporary spikes in hours to meet a goal, it's about the wrong-headed idea that one should be working 60-80+ hours on a long term basis.
Some of the proponents of long term overwork argue that it is a requirement for big successes in entrepreneurship or that people must be willing to burn themselves out to 'change the world' or other such nonsense.
Working long hours on a short term basis is not evil, but there are quite a few organizations exploiting their employees in a chase for big exits that those employees will never benefit from.
If it's a choice, that is fine. If it's an assumed baseline that management leverages to squeeze ever more "productivity" out of people without compensating them for it, then its not.
If the latter, I guarantee you will have just as much regret looking back years later. The 'voluntary' part is the gray area that most seem to talk around.
"I've never worked through a night. The only times I worked more than 40 hours in a week was when I had the burning desire to do so. I need 8ish hours of sleep a night. Same with everybody else, whether we admit it or not"
So he didn't. What about his employees?
Not to imply that long hours are necessary. I think they're abhorrent. But they're also endemic. Some bosses do get away with working shorter hours while they flog their employees to work like crazy. On the other hand, workaholism at many companies tends to gets worse and worse as you gain responsibility, and some of the most insane hours are worked by those near the top.
> Not to imply that long hours are necessary. I think they're abhorrent. But they're also endemic.
That's definitely true of the Bay Area, but Shopify is an Ottawa, Canada company. Having gone to college there, I don't get the feeling that Tobi is doing anything out of the ordinary for an Ottawa company. That may not be the case in Kitchener/Waterloo or Vancouver -- and it's definitely not true of the Bay Area -- but it's much less endemic out there.
It's at once nice to see but also frustrating because I feel like Ottawa tends to lack that drive, motivation and commitment broadly speaking to develop more Shopify-type companies. There's IBM, Mitel, Adobe, Blackberry, Corel and a bunch of companies selling into government out there from a tech perspective. But hey, hopefully Shopify leads the way here and we see more of them.
Shopify is something of a point of pride for Ottawa and I do wish them all the best!
I worked there. It's clearly a more focused environment than other SV companies I've seen since. Tobi works hard and does the right thing. I think the challenge was actually the first rung of middle managers not being smart enough to understand the long term focus. That's part that's hard to scale. But the leaders walked the talk and empowered others to do so.
I can't speak on behalf of the entire company (or even a portion of it), but anecdotally, my colleague previously worked at Shopify and said the atmosphere and culture there was very laid back. Taken in conjunction with the Twitter thread the CEO wrote, that all seems to check out.
If you read the Twitter thread [0], ostensibly they don't.
> For creative work, you can't cheat. My believe is that there are 5 creative hours in everyone's day. All I ask of people at Shopify is that 4 of those are channeled into the company.
Obviously Shopify has thousands of employees now, there's very real chance that Tobi's perception does not match the reality of the employees.
I always like Richard Hamming’s take on hours worked: “ 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.” (From “You and Your Research”: https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html)
I started incorporating this thinking into my own work schedule, and I believe it to be true. I certainly found that I grew incredibly quickly in my abilities when I started working more (as long as I was applying the hours intelligently, which is admittedly its own trick)
10% more in raw hours is just 44 hours a week. This whole issue is not about companies with 40 hr work weeks versus companies with 44 hour with weeks. It's about environments where 60, 70, 80+ hours a weeks is the norm.
I think the argument can be made for doing a bit extra regularly to improve and grow. But that's not what is happening in this ridiculous hustle culture where people are burning 60-80+ hours week all year round in an effort to win the rat race by running people into the ground.
I think this is the generally accepted and obvious view, but there seems to be a push from several popular personalities to virtue signal against it in the name of better working conditions. In the process they are accusing startup founders of abusing their workforce if they mention such an idea as working a little extra to get ahead.
In a "fresh out of school / fresh out of first job founder-wanting-to-build-a-startup" context, you often start with no connections, no capital, no world-class skills, no team, no game-changing idea. The only variable you can control is the amount of effort (time) you put into the venture trying to find something that works before you can no longer afford ramen. The hours are justified in that scenario, because you have no other resource to leverage outside of time.
Years later, when you're already comfortable, have a rich network of experts and trusted past associates, have easy access to capital, have decades of experience of building businesses, and a deep understanding of an industry of two? Yeah, you don't need the long hours, you're fine.
If you're fortunate enough to hit product market fit without too much struggle ... and then can scale it as a regular company - good on you.
But I suggest in the early years, it's really not like that for most founders as they pivot and strife.
In the scale years, I suggest it probably could be more like that for most company employees and leadership. And FYI I think most companies are like this i.e. more or less 9-to-5, even very well known corps.
I also think this might have very much to do with the nature of the technology and the inherent competitiveness/barriers in the category: in companies wherein there's a significant number of talented individuals needed to focus - crunching happens.
For example: Pixar films. Apparently people work pretty long and hard to make production work. It involves a lot of specific talent, working together with ambiguous timelines and schedules, last minute creative changes.
Spotify seems to be the kind of company perhaps wherein the work can be spread out fairly efficiently thereby enabling not only 9-5 hours, but perhaps more importantly: no need for A+ Valley Top Talent. I know Ottawa very well and there isn't remotely enough raw, high end A+ talent and specialisation of skills to make something like the iPhone.
Spotify can be built with a large number of 'smart people' (which Ottawa has aplenty), but I'm doubtful there will ever be an iPhone or 'Toy Story' come out of Ottawa either (though I would desperately like to be wrong).
I really like your comment. Dealing in absolutes, either way, seems incomplete. It really does depend on the kind of market you're in and the competitors that you face.
The one distinction I find important is between working long hours because of the nature of your situation v/s working long hours because your manager/company is exploiting you. Determining if that's the case or not is up to the worker.
In my opinion there's absolutely nothing to be proud about in working long hours for long stretches. All you're doing is setting up or maintaining a completely unmaintainable situation. If you're finding you have to work > 40 hours regularly, someone is making and signing off on bad estimates.
If you're salaried, and you're working extra hours regularly, all you're doing is reducing your effective hourly rate.
The reality is that there is no single answer. There are companies like Shopify that are able to build a platform while encouraging work-life balance. And then there are companies like Tesla, where employees are expected to forgo work-life balance. I think it comes down to how quickly you as a company may die if left on autopilot. I am going to guess that Shopify had near death moments, but probably fewer. OTOH, Tesla, remains in the default dead territory even now, that they are close to shipping half a million cars per year.
That said, a great work-life balance is great to strive for, just that depending on what your company does, it may or may not happen soon enough.
Shopify started off selling snowboards on the internet, Elon took on one of the most powerful, politically connected, and entrenched industries head-on.
There’s always going to be significant differences in the business dynamics and the public pressure on Tesla and their crew was insane. Unfortunately that shit rolls downhill sometimes and it’s hard to control.
Shopify also never faced the massive and constant vitriol and naysayers from day one. It was a massive play out of the gate, not a hockey stick growth but a massive capital investment covering multiple very difficult verticles all at once from design to operations to production and managing a very expensive and risky customer lifespan and regulatory risk for every car sold. Not to downplay how hard it is to do what Shopify accomplished, which was significant and very admirable. But ultimately it’s comparing apples to oranges at a high level like that.
1st week of December, I did 87 hours clocked on clockify for clients. I turn clock off when I go to the bathroom, or get distracted on HN/Reddit. It's only on while I'm coding.
But I get burnt out fast when on a schedule like that, and knew I'd have some downtime with holidays and need to fill up on work to pay bills in January. Definitely couldn't sustain hours like that unless I was CEO and it was my baby then I'd be more apt to just keep going because it's a passion project.
It has spread to take over twitter and spawned articles and CEOs of large companies weighing in, and now on hacker news. Fascinating to watch where our news starts from and how it spreads
I wholeheartedly agree as well. The key to working less, while being successful is to focus on what will give you the best rate of return and not doing the things that are not useful. That is really hard to figure out initially though. But I think it gets easier as you get more experienced, as your personal value system gets better tweaked to match reality.
This applies to the company as well like Jason Fried said. The company should have clear values that are attuned to market value and it should be professionally run.
I'm quite glad that working more hours isn't productive. It's good we have an inate defense against that race to the bottom. Makes the societal battle (imagine it being illegal to work more hours, deemed being unfair competition) a bit easier to win.
The word "work" is not specific enough in this context, and this whole discussion lacks nuance. When we talk about "work" are we talking about renting your own time, or building something you have a stake in? Does a side project that may give you insight into your main focus apply as work? Does reading and curiosity count as work? I spend nearly every waking hour trying to be successful... is that work? I'd like to introduce the word "toil" into the discussion. Elon Musk may "work" 100 hours a week, but there's no chance he's "toiling" 100 hours a week.
I find if you have a exciting project and you've developed a great team (which includes soft-skills; great technical skills does not necessarily make a great employee), I find a lot of team members voluntarily thinking about the project outside of hours or staying late because they want to.
Whilst more hours certainly doesn't mean more productivity, the idea of nurturing intrinsic motivation is often omitted in discussions about working late and it's more an implicit by-product of a good working environment.
I remember when I applied to work there as an iOS engineer and they didn't even phone screen me because I didn't have a strong enough social media profile.
I think the shortening of "financial and business success" to "success" can be a bit unfortunate.
My big metric for success is currently how many hours I can spend on my bike a week while still feeding myself and providing for loved ones responsibly.
This is really a lovely thread. In general I loathe working at large companies and try to avoid it, but this really changes my perception of Shopify. The fact is that people who say they work 80 hours don't really do it. If they ever do it it's a rare event in the totality of their labor.
let's see what happens if he starts today all over again. He forgot to mention the most important thing, that he was at the right place and right time. No matter how you come up with a 1000x better Shopify today, you most probably won't go anywhere. Many clunky business projects that were started with the rise of social media (around 2004-2013) made their owners kings ONLY because they were at the right place and time. The free ride is over. His argument is mostly bullshit for anyone starting today, the internet is much more centralized and you can't go viral unless you spend a fortune assuming having a superior product. It's a billion times harder today to succeed with a great product today than with a barely average one 15 years ago.
I don't think that argument holds at all. The low hanging fruit from 10 years ago has been picked. But in a lot of ways we only see it as low hanging fruit in hindsight. Today there are new business opportunities that in 10 years will seem like they were low hanging fruit. There are new technologies today that will enable new businesses that wouldn't have been feasible before.
Even then, there are only going to be but so many companies that get to the kind of scale of Shopify and that was true 15 years ago, and it's true today. But there is plenty of room for new small and medium sized companies to make millions of dollars. Success doesn't always have to be at the 3 comma level.
In jobs that don't compensate overtime, that have no improved networking component after hours, and suffer from declined cognitive output after 6-8 hours you absolutely shouldnt work longer
What's unfortunate is that on the other side of the coin, "rockstar CEOs" like Elon Musk claim they sleep 4 hours a night and work 90 hour weeks. I think Musk does this mostly for publicity/image reasons and not that it's actually true, but you've got plenty of wantapreneurs parroting this (imo) unhealthy lifestyle.
>ElonMuskOfficial:
I actually measured this with my phone! Almost exactly 6 hours on average.
The 4 hour thing seems kind of made up by journalists for clickbait as far as I can tell from a brief google. Though he was up last night working on Starship stuff that seems quite cool https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1210649166407438336
And we've seen the news stories here that his employees would hope he wouldn't "work" at their department because he'd often change things or otherwise slow them down affecting quality and quantity
There is anecdotal information that he does indeed do what he claims. And he is the most impressive CEO in this generation, perhaps in history, so long hours must work for some people.
I think we're all rooting for the narrative that it's possible to get ahead working 9-5. But it's hard for me to ignore the survivorship bias at play here. Yes, if your company has a market cap in the billions, you probably don't need to be grinding on the weekends anymore. If you've built a company with amazing programmers and predictable revenue (e.g., dhh/Jason Fried) you probably don't need to grind weekends.
But when you're at the front lines, striving to create something new, you'll be competing against very motivated entrepreneurs. These entrepreneurs will often have more resources than you, and zero aversion to working weekends. In those circumstances, Tobi's lifestyle probably isn't going to cut it. When an entrepreneur is working to create that spark, it pays to be completely obsessed, sometimes for years.
Thankfully, very few of us are on the front lines struggling to launch something momentous. Tobi once was, but he was smart and surrounded by great people, and now he's in scaling mode, which seems like a much different beast. I'm grateful that he and other successful tech leaders don't force their teams to work as hard as they needed to in the early days.
> But it's hard for me to ignore the survivorship bias at play here.
Surely it works the other way as well -- for all the stories of people who worked all night to achieve success, there are others about people who either did so and didn't win, or worse yet burnt themselves out or hurt their lives in other ways.
I think his point was more about focus. If you know what you’re doing, you can do it on any (reasonable) timeline you want.
Most entrepreneurs are just chasing money like a Leprechaun. Wherever it goes, you follow. Run, turn, grind, pivot.
Shopify has always been really focused. Moves slower than the competition in many ways. They’ve been at it for 15 years. Mostly behind the scenes, not the sexiest stuff.
When you have a simple business you don’t have to grind weekends to try and convince someone to give you more money. The business is self sustaining and profitable.
Shopify is obsessed with growth like every other public company. They are nothing like Basecamp. They can get away with shorter hours, maybe, because Canadian salaries are relatively low compared to San Francisco, but something will eventually have to give.
Maybe Shopify’s growth is actually due to their shorter hours. Study after study shows this to be true, but for some reason the Bay Area can’t wrap their minds around that fact. In all likelihood Bay Area companies would be more productive if they forced their employees to go home after 40 hours.
> For creative work, you can't cheat. My believe is that there are 5 creative hours in everyone's day. All I ask of people at Shopify is that 4 of those are channeled into the company.
He's practically asking to put company success before personal growth.
That's incredibly selfish if you ask me.
Some others, with job titles similar to him, speak of "giving 110%" and how their employees are so dedicated to the company, they gladly take on overtime and crunch and whatnot. This seems refreshingly honest to me in comparison.
Using his math, there's 35 creative hours per person per week; assuming a 5-day work week, he's _paying_ for 20 of those and leaving 15 for personal growth. Sure, some might prefer a different ratio, but at least he's acknowledging that there needs to be a balance.
I think it's wrong to celebrate a company that claims 80% of what it is to be you, even when other companies claim even more. I question the reason behind us devoting ourselves to these undemocratic structures.
I worked at Shopify for 4 1/2 years. I was happy to devote those creative hours because I believe in the mission. It's where I wanted my energy to be spent, and this was the general sentiment.
You have to remember most of the people who work there can work almost anywhere. They have specifically chosen to dedicate 80% of their creative energy at Shopify.
Anyone who thinks he would've achieved the same with far fewer hours are just kidding themselves and pulling crabs down into the bucket. Also implicit in that is Carmack being a fool for working 60, when he would've been as or more(!) effective with less? Nonsense.
Founding and being the CEO of Shopify, a $48bn company and one of the best-performing stocks of the last few years, isn't "the top"?
Different people have different styles that work for them. Some people love to work 60+ hours and are productive doing it, others get more and better work done when they limit themselves to 40 and take time off. What works for you/Tobi/John doesn't universally work for others.
bwb|6 years ago
I've done 60 hours during intense periods just fine... but it was only effective because of the nature of the work I was doing at the time. And, I usually took a break down the road to compensate. In no way was it even 50% creative work.
4 to 6 creative hours seems right, but a lot of work isn't creative. There is also the bullshit work that still has to get done, ie, loading up contacts in a CRM, building and nurturing relationships, reviewing emails, checking links, etc etc etc..
AndrewKemendo|6 years ago
Here's an example of just last Thursday which was busy but was at least not double booked and had some times I could stop and go to the bathroom, I also wasn't traveling this day which was good:
8-12 - US Senate Staff Delegation and budget review
12-1 - Software Requisition Review
1-2 - Infrastructure planning meeting
2-3 - Conference call with colleague in HI
3-4 - Meeting with an LP
4-5 - Talking with my Deputy and Admin
5-7 - Meeting with Army Futures
7 - Dinner
8-10 - Emails, Award review for employees, look over presentations due in Jan/Feb
Now, almost none of that work is creative because I'm not in a creative job anymore really. I am an executive with a 200 person data engineering and data science team building the future way the DoD builds and runs software.
That's how you get to these hours.
I'd also suggest that "Building and nurturing relationships" isn't "Bullshit work."
awinder|6 years ago
1. Hours worked & productivity are interrelated variables but they do not equal each other. So you have to explore the other variables involved in your productivity equation if you want to control effects on productivity.
2. The brain works on solving big problems even when you’re not actively focused on it. Anyone who experiences the effect of coming back to a problem they were beating their heads on for a while and quickly figured out a path forward has experienced this first hand.
3. If you’ve bought into this, then also consider that your output is solved problems. That’s what other people will see about your work. If the outcome is that you stayed at the office for 12 hours solving a problem, versus at work for 6 hours, said f this, went home, came back the next morning and worked the problem out in an hour, then what was the difference?
You kinda keyed in that a lot of work is not creative, so I think that kinda fits into this framework too. I find that doing rote work is a nice warm up or wind down block of time. So having scheduling awareness can help boost your productivity. But yeah for all of that, I’ve never been able to buy into the idea that 60/80 hour work weeks are at all a necessary idea, or a very proper one either. And this is how I’ve tried to make myself feel better that I could never personally do that kind of time, lol.
bobthemover|6 years ago
Most of your work is being present, either in meetings or work functions. These will include breakfast lunch and dinner, and something all three on the same day.
Your main focus is communication. This work extends to working within your own departments, the company, the rest of senior management, government, share holders, banks etc.
Most of your hours are not effective. You write them off. It’s understanding that you only have 10 hours a week of effective hours out of 80 hours and making sure those hours are actually effective.Effective time will be 5 minutes in an hour most likely.
That said some people are really good at juggling all of this bs, and some people are really terrible.
We can talk about different approaches and what works and what doesn’t, but it doesn’t change the fact that the 80 to 100 hour work week is real for a lot of people in that position.
Permit|6 years ago
HN discussion at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6760685
I'm also open to the possibility that might be a very small percentage of people who could do it and that I might just not be one of them.
I'm also open to the possibility that I've been conditioned to expect 40 hour work weeks and that's why I may not be able to do much more. Apparently it's common for students in China to attend school for 12 hours a day. Perhaps if I'd been raised in a similar environment it would be easier to focus for longer?
toufka|6 years ago
And you're right, that those hours are not all 'at the desk working', but they are still most definitely working hours when you're waiting for a page, an email, or a piece of data that require immediate response at 3am.
That kind of work can be deeply rewarding (in retrospect), but is very clearly damaging if it persists for too long.
Consultant32452|6 years ago
Aunche|6 years ago
blhack|6 years ago
Obviously unsustainable, but easily one of the most enjoyable periods of my work life. Everybody was helping doing everybody else’s job. It was really fun.
losvedir|6 years ago
That's a weird thing to believe. I saw it all the time when I worked in finance (but I was capped at 60 hrs, which I did routinely), and it seems pretty par-for-the-course for my friends who are doctors and lawyers.
I don't think it's healthy, but it's certainly done.
lefstathiou|6 years ago
To your first statement, it is possible and very common in law and investment banking, so it’s easy to dispel that misconception for you. I worked in investment banking for years and there were dozens of people on my floor which was one of dozens of floors pulling 70-90 hour weeks routinely. There is some % of an 80 hour week lost in transition (sitting at a desk waiting for feedback on a book that needs to go to printing by 4am for the 8am meeting) but you have no choice but to be there and at any moment you have to be prepared to act on whatever next step is required.
To your second point: was this work deeply creative or meaningful? To me it was. Perhaps less creative than technical. As for meaning, that depends. We would routinely work on projects that had 9-figure dollar impact on companies with tens of thousands of employees. Our numbers determined the fates of thousands of employees and hundreds of thousands in their supply chains. Today I manage over 50 people, while I have a more direct human impact now than I did then, my impact today is a fraction of what it was when our teams changed the course of companies from a little Excel spreadsheet.
efsavage|6 years ago
I did a 7 month stretch where I was working from home, on my own schedule, doing what I loved, and was doing 15-18 hour days 6 days a week (~90-100/week), while still managing to have/cook dinner and a bit of downtime with my now-wife each day, plus a full day off. It was fantastic.
Once the product was live the work shifted just so slightly from pure create/build to maintenance/improvements, going into the office a couple of days a week, and suddenly even 60 hours felt like a lot, and eventually it was just a job and I was doing 40-45.
I think it's more a matter of finding the right thing and schedule for you rather than imposing some kind of convention onto it.
carbocation|6 years ago
SecurityAmoeba|6 years ago
nugget|6 years ago
soperj|6 years ago
nik736|6 years ago
Would I do it again? Absolutely not, because it is simply bad management. But I can imagine how easy it is to get stuck in such a work environment. Or people might think "when it is working once, it will work all the time". The truth is that if the deadlines and work would have been planned better it would easily be achievable in 40 hours.
The problem is that some startups are super chaotic, overpromise, underdeliver without even thinking about how long something takes.
twmahna|6 years ago
golergka|6 years ago
CydeWeys|6 years ago
king_panic|6 years ago
davedx|6 years ago
Kenji|6 years ago
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trianglem|6 years ago
thetrumanshow|6 years ago
1) If I know exactly where to spend my time for the best rate of return, its likely that I'll have to spend relatively few hours achieving success.
2) For most people, the success they can achieve through just having a plain old job can be had for a mere 40 hours. Anything they want above what 40 hours can grant them should probably be done elsewhere (second job, side-hustle, etc) since the ROI will be very low for spending those additional hours at work.
3) The 80 hour week lifestyle is probably necessary for people who are still frantically doing what Felix Dennis calls "The Search", trying to build a company without the foggiest notion what people want.
simonw|6 years ago
I loved what Tobi said in this tweet: https://twitter.com/simonw/status/1210622908143415297
"For creative work, you can't cheat. My believe is that there are 5 creative hours in everyone's day. All I ask of people at Shopify is that 4 of those are channeled into the company."
5 creative hours in a day absolutely matches my experience based on my own career. I can get a HUGE amount done in those 5 hours if I apply them sensibly.
dangero|6 years ago
hintymad|6 years ago
See? Working long hours sometimes is not a burden, but a choice, a choice that one makes to master what they love, and to make sure they won't regret wasting their life when looking back years later. And sometimes working long hours, as long as it's voluntary, is the only way to succeed.
GVIrish|6 years ago
Some of the proponents of long term overwork argue that it is a requirement for big successes in entrepreneurship or that people must be willing to burn themselves out to 'change the world' or other such nonsense.
Working long hours on a short term basis is not evil, but there are quite a few organizations exploiting their employees in a chase for big exits that those employees will never benefit from.
zeruch|6 years ago
If the latter, I guarantee you will have just as much regret looking back years later. The 'voluntary' part is the gray area that most seem to talk around.
pmoriarty|6 years ago
So he didn't. What about his employees?
Not to imply that long hours are necessary. I think they're abhorrent. But they're also endemic. Some bosses do get away with working shorter hours while they flog their employees to work like crazy. On the other hand, workaholism at many companies tends to gets worse and worse as you gain responsibility, and some of the most insane hours are worked by those near the top.
arcticbull|6 years ago
That's definitely true of the Bay Area, but Shopify is an Ottawa, Canada company. Having gone to college there, I don't get the feeling that Tobi is doing anything out of the ordinary for an Ottawa company. That may not be the case in Kitchener/Waterloo or Vancouver -- and it's definitely not true of the Bay Area -- but it's much less endemic out there.
It's at once nice to see but also frustrating because I feel like Ottawa tends to lack that drive, motivation and commitment broadly speaking to develop more Shopify-type companies. There's IBM, Mitel, Adobe, Blackberry, Corel and a bunch of companies selling into government out there from a tech perspective. But hey, hopefully Shopify leads the way here and we see more of them.
Shopify is something of a point of pride for Ottawa and I do wish them all the best!
rogerkirkness|6 years ago
thebradbain|6 years ago
luhn|6 years ago
> For creative work, you can't cheat. My believe is that there are 5 creative hours in everyone's day. All I ask of people at Shopify is that 4 of those are channeled into the company.
Obviously Shopify has thousands of employees now, there's very real chance that Tobi's perception does not match the reality of the employees.
[0] https://twitter.com/tobi/status/1210242184341000192
bertr4nd|6 years ago
I started incorporating this thinking into my own work schedule, and I believe it to be true. I certainly found that I grew incredibly quickly in my abilities when I started working more (as long as I was applying the hours intelligently, which is admittedly its own trick)
GVIrish|6 years ago
I think the argument can be made for doing a bit extra regularly to improve and grow. But that's not what is happening in this ridiculous hustle culture where people are burning 60-80+ hours week all year round in an effort to win the rat race by running people into the ground.
dangero|6 years ago
BadassFractal|6 years ago
Years later, when you're already comfortable, have a rich network of experts and trusted past associates, have easy access to capital, have decades of experience of building businesses, and a deep understanding of an industry of two? Yeah, you don't need the long hours, you're fine.
IB885588|6 years ago
keyP|6 years ago
dang|6 years ago
What does the s=20 do?
jariel|6 years ago
If you're fortunate enough to hit product market fit without too much struggle ... and then can scale it as a regular company - good on you.
But I suggest in the early years, it's really not like that for most founders as they pivot and strife.
In the scale years, I suggest it probably could be more like that for most company employees and leadership. And FYI I think most companies are like this i.e. more or less 9-to-5, even very well known corps.
I also think this might have very much to do with the nature of the technology and the inherent competitiveness/barriers in the category: in companies wherein there's a significant number of talented individuals needed to focus - crunching happens.
For example: Pixar films. Apparently people work pretty long and hard to make production work. It involves a lot of specific talent, working together with ambiguous timelines and schedules, last minute creative changes.
Spotify seems to be the kind of company perhaps wherein the work can be spread out fairly efficiently thereby enabling not only 9-5 hours, but perhaps more importantly: no need for A+ Valley Top Talent. I know Ottawa very well and there isn't remotely enough raw, high end A+ talent and specialisation of skills to make something like the iPhone.
Spotify can be built with a large number of 'smart people' (which Ottawa has aplenty), but I'm doubtful there will ever be an iPhone or 'Toy Story' come out of Ottawa either (though I would desperately like to be wrong).
pm90|6 years ago
The one distinction I find important is between working long hours because of the nature of your situation v/s working long hours because your manager/company is exploiting you. Determining if that's the case or not is up to the worker.
leblancfg|6 years ago
patrickdavey|6 years ago
If you're salaried, and you're working extra hours regularly, all you're doing is reducing your effective hourly rate.
vgchh|6 years ago
That said, a great work-life balance is great to strive for, just that depending on what your company does, it may or may not happen soon enough.
dmix|6 years ago
There’s always going to be significant differences in the business dynamics and the public pressure on Tesla and their crew was insane. Unfortunately that shit rolls downhill sometimes and it’s hard to control.
Shopify also never faced the massive and constant vitriol and naysayers from day one. It was a massive play out of the gate, not a hockey stick growth but a massive capital investment covering multiple very difficult verticles all at once from design to operations to production and managing a very expensive and risky customer lifespan and regulatory risk for every car sold. Not to downplay how hard it is to do what Shopify accomplished, which was significant and very admirable. But ultimately it’s comparing apples to oranges at a high level like that.
gremlinsinc|6 years ago
But I get burnt out fast when on a schedule like that, and knew I'd have some downtime with holidays and need to fill up on work to pay bills in January. Definitely couldn't sustain hours like that unless I was CEO and it was my baby then I'd be more apt to just keep going because it's a passion project.
cdiddy2|6 years ago
It has spread to take over twitter and spawned articles and CEOs of large companies weighing in, and now on hacker news. Fascinating to watch where our news starts from and how it spreads
bhouston|6 years ago
https://twitter.com/jasonfried/status/1209115637148274690
I wholeheartedly agree as well. The key to working less, while being successful is to focus on what will give you the best rate of return and not doing the things that are not useful. That is really hard to figure out initially though. But I think it gets easier as you get more experienced, as your personal value system gets better tweaked to match reality.
This applies to the company as well like Jason Fried said. The company should have clear values that are attuned to market value and it should be professionally run.
Ericson2314|6 years ago
shanemlk|6 years ago
keyP|6 years ago
Whilst more hours certainly doesn't mean more productivity, the idea of nurturing intrinsic motivation is often omitted in discussions about working late and it's more an implicit by-product of a good working environment.
nathanvanfleet|6 years ago
andruby|6 years ago
wrnr|6 years ago
rajacombinator|6 years ago
CitrusFruits|6 years ago
My big metric for success is currently how many hours I can spend on my bike a week while still feeding myself and providing for loved ones responsibly.
ixtli|6 years ago
neo4sure|6 years ago
wesleywt|6 years ago
nif2ee|6 years ago
GVIrish|6 years ago
Even then, there are only going to be but so many companies that get to the kind of scale of Shopify and that was true 15 years ago, and it's true today. But there is plenty of room for new small and medium sized companies to make millions of dollars. Success doesn't always have to be at the 3 comma level.
rolltiide|6 years ago
Success is never defined
dvt|6 years ago
system16|6 years ago
tim333|6 years ago
>How much do you sleep per night, on average?
>ElonMuskOfficial: I actually measured this with my phone! Almost exactly 6 hours on average.
The 4 hour thing seems kind of made up by journalists for clickbait as far as I can tell from a brief google. Though he was up last night working on Starship stuff that seems quite cool https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1210649166407438336
smileysteve|6 years ago
slumdev|6 years ago
This is not healthy or impressive, and it may be the first sign of dementia for many people.
ilrwbwrkhv|6 years ago
zarkov99|6 years ago
krishsai|6 years ago
wbharding|6 years ago
But when you're at the front lines, striving to create something new, you'll be competing against very motivated entrepreneurs. These entrepreneurs will often have more resources than you, and zero aversion to working weekends. In those circumstances, Tobi's lifestyle probably isn't going to cut it. When an entrepreneur is working to create that spark, it pays to be completely obsessed, sometimes for years.
Thankfully, very few of us are on the front lines struggling to launch something momentous. Tobi once was, but he was smart and surrounded by great people, and now he's in scaling mode, which seems like a much different beast. I'm grateful that he and other successful tech leaders don't force their teams to work as hard as they needed to in the early days.
zorpner|6 years ago
Surely it works the other way as well -- for all the stories of people who worked all night to achieve success, there are others about people who either did so and didn't win, or worse yet burnt themselves out or hurt their lives in other ways.
themagician|6 years ago
Most entrepreneurs are just chasing money like a Leprechaun. Wherever it goes, you follow. Run, turn, grind, pivot.
Shopify has always been really focused. Moves slower than the competition in many ways. They’ve been at it for 15 years. Mostly behind the scenes, not the sexiest stuff.
When you have a simple business you don’t have to grind weekends to try and convince someone to give you more money. The business is self sustaining and profitable.
achow|6 years ago
...never...
pastor_elm|6 years ago
pat2man|6 years ago
abledon|6 years ago
samwestdev|6 years ago
He's practically asking to put company success before personal growth. That's incredibly selfish if you ask me.
MattConfluence|6 years ago
Some others, with job titles similar to him, speak of "giving 110%" and how their employees are so dedicated to the company, they gladly take on overtime and crunch and whatnot. This seems refreshingly honest to me in comparison.
Using his math, there's 35 creative hours per person per week; assuming a 5-day work week, he's _paying_ for 20 of those and leaving 15 for personal growth. Sure, some might prefer a different ratio, but at least he's acknowledging that there needs to be a balance.
misterman0|6 years ago
richardlblair|6 years ago
You have to remember most of the people who work there can work almost anywhere. They have specifically chosen to dedicate 80% of their creative energy at Shopify.
Reedx|6 years ago
It's an inconvenient truth, but you're not going to be able to reach the John Carmacks of the world if you're working 40 and they're working 60: https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/1210593150303031296
Anyone who thinks he would've achieved the same with far fewer hours are just kidding themselves and pulling crabs down into the bucket. Also implicit in that is Carmack being a fool for working 60, when he would've been as or more(!) effective with less? Nonsense.
wiwillia|6 years ago
Different people have different styles that work for them. Some people love to work 60+ hours and are productive doing it, others get more and better work done when they limit themselves to 40 and take time off. What works for you/Tobi/John doesn't universally work for others.