Work 60 hours a week
When will we finally understand that there is a negative correlation between time and productivity in creative type jobs?
When will we finally understand that there is a negative correlation between time and productivity in creative type jobs?
A tired engineer will make mistakes that are hard to find and fix. Causing hidden costs the organization has to fix anyway.
It is never about the amount of code or the amount of simulation or training rounds done.
It is about finding the effective thing to do.
A tired, exhausted, demoralized, hungry mind can not be creative.
It will just revert to base instincts. Not fit for high-concept work. Fit for basic survival.
Creating a good user experience takes thought, ideas, and writing a performant, critical-bug-free, maintainable code takes careful thought.
Not just making up a few lines of story to tell everyone on a meeting.
It takes logical reasoning, repeatedly a thousand times, over a vast problem space generated by the multiplication of possibly values of all variables.
Solve problems once. Then move on to next problem. If you need to return a dozen times to the previous one to fix something that was expected to work the first time, than you did not solve the problem.
And you have a new one, run-away scope creep this time self-inflicted and not from business reqs changing, latter is just part of life.
Scientific progress gave us our modern world. Listen to its findings even when feels inconvenient.
And I know, I don’t want to go into my 80s with regret.
[repost of Kevin Maguire]
Billionaires like Musk, Brin, and Bezos want us to work 60+ hour workweeks while teams of nannies raise their children. It's time we said "enough."
Last week, the NYT reported that Google co-founder Sergey Brin told employees working on their Gemini AI product that to "win" the race to AGI, "I recommend being in the office 𝗮𝘁 𝗹𝗲𝗮𝘀𝘁 every weekday ... 60 hours a week is the sweet spot of productivity."
I'm done with this garbage. How much longer must we listen to billionaire male leaders with teams of home help tell the rank and file that they're not "hardcore" enough? That what is required is sacrificing even more of the limited time we have with our families?
How often have you heard men—and sorry, but it's almost always men—say "I'm doing this for my family" to justify grinding away at 60-hour weeks? There's a reason this keeps happening.
It's got little to do with "work-life balance" and much more to do with ego and how society defines success for men.
I saw it firsthand, getting passed over for career advancement because I was "leaving whenever I pleased" to be home for bedtime with my newborn daughter—before inevitably returning to emails and pings from the US that went long beyond midnight.
The real barriers to innovation at tech giants aren't "lazy" engineers or empty chairs. They're labyrinthine approval processes, where simple decisions require sign-offs from 12 different teams with conflicting OKRs. They're meetings about meetings about meetings to amend yet another internal deck. They're promotion systems that reward individual heroics over collaboration.
When tech leaders like Musk demand "extremely hardcore" work conditions, I wonder if they've forgotten what it means to be human. With his 13 children in various states of abandonment, asking us to cast aside our own families to prop up his companies' stock price. The irony would be comical if it weren't so damaging.
I've seen both worlds. A well-rested worker with four focused hours accomplishes more than a sleep-deprived one with 14 distracted ones. The research backs this up:
📉 Stanford: Productivity sharply declines after 50 hours, with virtually no output after 55
🧠 Nature: Cognitive function declines ~25% after the 9th hour of work
🔄 Microsoft Japan's 4-day workweek experiment increased productivity by 40%
💡 Gothenburg's 6-hour workday study showed nurses were 64% more productive, took fewer sick days, and reported higher job satisfaction
So to every leader demanding we sacrifice our humanity on the altar of productivity, I have just one question:
When you're 80 and look back on your life, will you wish you'd spent more time with your family or more time in the office?
Those 60+ hours in the office? That's over half the hours we spend awake during our lifetime: missed bedtimes and dinnertimes, huge chunks of our kids’ lives when we should be by their side.
I know my answer.
What's yours?