I think I've given the wrong impression here. Everyone is disagreeing, and probably rightly for how I've phrased it, so let me try again.
I'm not saying that I believe our employee was lazy because he refused to work Sundays. I feel that we hired someone who wasn't sold on the whole startup thing, and treated an early stage startup as if it were a regular job.
I recall a talk from an early Googler, who worked 100 hour weeks for the first five years. Startups need dedication, not because of some kind of culture, or because some exec says so, but because everything is constantly falling apart and it always needs work. You could surely do them differently (perhaps a low-stress startup), but that is another animal altogether.
So the point is you need someone intrinsically motivated to make the startup succeed. Anyone else is the wrong fit.
I dont understand you are complaining that your EMPLOYEE isnt doing 100hours weeks when at the same time you, the CO-FOUNDER, were in "honeymoon for most of May" [1] ???? WTF!
Of all the things pointed out in the article, this is the one single thing that I could not see a reasonable defense to, and he didn't even mention this as one of the problems!
When a launch is imminent and you are a CO-FOUNDER, and you take a vacation, this is grossly irresponsible. The whole "life happens" comment he uses as a minor defense to it, well....guess what? Work is a part of life too! We juggle work, home, family, friends, hobbies, etc etc all the time, and it's up to us to be responsible on deciding which gets priority at any given time. While one aspect is more important to each of us, there will always be times when something trumps it, regardless of category. And well, a launch of your business compared to going on a honeymoon? Yes, absolutely that trumps it!
A honeymoon can be postponed. I've had many friends that postponed it an entire year! Sorry, I simply cannot find justification for this single act alone.
I am reminded of a certain Christian organization that I studied in college.
There is an idea in Protestant Christianity (going back to Jesus or to Martin Luther, depending on whom you ask :-) that you don’t actually earn a ticket to heaven by doing good deeds; rather, heaven is for those who believe in the appropriate Christian dogma, even if their actions in this world are not always perfect.
Anyway, this organization expected certain things of its members, and their theological spin was something like this: if you have the proper belief and get baptized by them, you will be saved from eternal hellfire and you will be filled with a God-given spirit to do good deeds, and among those good deeds was working your ass off for this particular organization. If you weren’t working your ass off, your peers and leaders, running that chain of logic in the opposite direction, would suspect that your baptism hadn’t really taken.
I realize that to someone in that organization, there is a significant difference between the above theology and a simple statement of “the way to get to heaven is to work your ass off for us”. However, to me on the outside, the distinction is... rather too subtle.
The most devoted guy in our firm works easily the shortest hours - but he works like stink and if the product demands it he will work a "late" to get a feature out the door.
Usually, though, he has already got it done.
I've found that hours worked is a poor measure of product devotion :)
> I feel that we hired someone who wasn't sold on the whole startup thing, and treated an early stage startup as if it were a regular job.
Or maybe he realized that working long hours on the same thing with no breaks would actually bring productivity down below what a normal 40 hour week would after just a few weeks. You know, maybe he actually kept up on the science of productivity.
It seems to me that it's come up several times that in your company you chose to follow what you thought was right instead of actually researching it. I hope you can correct this before future ventures.
I apologize for my flippant remark above. People aren't getting what I'm trying to say in this thread, and my remark reflected that.
The key part here is that it's not sustainable long term. It would be silly to optimize for long-term productivity with launch looming and features unimplemented.
According to the latest research I've seen, you start dropping productivity within a couple of weeks of over work. You were in this mode for months, no?
Personally yes, same for my co-founder. However, the employee under discussion had only just started.
(and a quick reminder here that we're not discussing the employee's passion for the startup--which everyone would agree was low--not his "goodness" as a human being or as a developer.)
I think it's just that people show their intrinsic motivation in different ways.
I consider developing to be a creative kind of job, one where more arse-in-seat time means lower or even negative productivity. Our designer gets off with even less work than my developers. It's about keeping a fresh mind so you can churn out your best stuff. Instead of churning out a lot of mediocre stuff.
Perhaps when we're big enough to have code monkeys there will be time for people wanting to spend such insane hours working :)
> I consider developing to be a creative kind of job, one where more arse-in-seat time means lower or even negative productivity.
As much as I would like to believe this, I don't think it's true. Looking at people who do PhDs, including myself, they work 60-80 hour weeks because you can get more done in that time than working 40 hour weeks. Every startup founder ever has worked extremely long hours. Googlers and Mozillians are in the office long past 5pm.
Certainly your productivity drops on a sliding scale probably after 20 hours of work, but to suggest that 100 hours does not get more done than 40 is pure fiction.
There was a great post here a while back that said that research showed not only does total productivity start to decline if you go too far beyond 40 hour weeks on a prolonged basis but (and this is the kicker) your subjective evaluation of your productivity gets out of whack so you're less productive but you think you're more productive.
If you’re trying to get a PhD and your advisor expects you to work 60-hour weeks, then you either work 60-hour weeks or you consider a different path in life. That speaks volumes about what it takes to impress your superiors in a semi-feudal institution, but not much about productivity.
Personally I think that 40 is a little low. Especially considering you aren't working at 100% all the time. For me the sweet spot between a creative brain and enough churning-out-code is 60 to 70 productive hours a week. These include things that aren't strictly work work, but help with serendipity and ideas.
This all seems to me that you were trying to hire a machine. They will work on weekends and evenings without too much complaint, but form my experience as an employee, there are very few humans willing to work those kinds of hours and be happy about it. On an odd occasion when needs must, yes, but every day and every week will always lead to the inevitable. For most people (and maybe even more so in the UK), working at a startup is just another job, maybe not to you, but to them it will be. I also found as a PhD student those who worked longer hours never finished any quicker than those who enjoyed their time a little more - this is only my personal experience though. Maybe one of your biggest mistakes was not understanding people as well as you think you do - I dunno.
Paul, you mention that you weren't motivated to make the business succeed: "[O]ur motivation to make a successful company got destroyed by all of the above." But you also mention that you were working 100-hour weeks. Do you think you had sufficient motivation to work, say, 60-hour weeks?
This is roughly what WePay, another YCombinator start-up, worked and called "Khang's hours".
I think the subject matter was the important bit. News wasn't our thing. 60 hour weeks are pretty easy if you enjoy the subject, and 80 hour weeks would even be fine. 100 hour weeks probably shouldn't ever be used long-term.
Comments
I think I've given the wrong impression here. Everyone is disagreeing, and probably rightly for how I've phrased it, so let me try again.
I'm not saying that I believe our employee was lazy because he refused to work Sundays. I feel that we hired someone who wasn't sold on the whole startup thing, and treated an early stage startup as if it were a regular job.
I recall a talk from an early Googler, who worked 100 hour weeks for the first five years. Startups need dedication, not because of some kind of culture, or because some exec says so, but because everything is constantly falling apart and it always needs work. You could surely do them differently (perhaps a low-stress startup), but that is another animal altogether.
So the point is you need someone intrinsically motivated to make the startup succeed. Anyone else is the wrong fit.
I dont understand you are complaining that your EMPLOYEE isnt doing 100hours weeks when at the same time you, the CO-FOUNDER, were in "honeymoon for most of May" [1] ???? WTF!
[1]http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=45&aid=185999
Of all the things pointed out in the article, this is the one single thing that I could not see a reasonable defense to, and he didn't even mention this as one of the problems!
When a launch is imminent and you are a CO-FOUNDER, and you take a vacation, this is grossly irresponsible. The whole "life happens" comment he uses as a minor defense to it, well....guess what? Work is a part of life too! We juggle work, home, family, friends, hobbies, etc etc all the time, and it's up to us to be responsible on deciding which gets priority at any given time. While one aspect is more important to each of us, there will always be times when something trumps it, regardless of category. And well, a launch of your business compared to going on a honeymoon? Yes, absolutely that trumps it!
A honeymoon can be postponed. I've had many friends that postponed it an entire year! Sorry, I simply cannot find justification for this single act alone.
I am reminded of a certain Christian organization that I studied in college.
There is an idea in Protestant Christianity (going back to Jesus or to Martin Luther, depending on whom you ask :-) that you don’t actually earn a ticket to heaven by doing good deeds; rather, heaven is for those who believe in the appropriate Christian dogma, even if their actions in this world are not always perfect.
Anyway, this organization expected certain things of its members, and their theological spin was something like this: if you have the proper belief and get baptized by them, you will be saved from eternal hellfire and you will be filled with a God-given spirit to do good deeds, and among those good deeds was working your ass off for this particular organization. If you weren’t working your ass off, your peers and leaders, running that chain of logic in the opposite direction, would suspect that your baptism hadn’t really taken.
I realize that to someone in that organization, there is a significant difference between the above theology and a simple statement of “the way to get to heaven is to work your ass off for us”. However, to me on the outside, the distinction is... rather too subtle.
The most devoted guy in our firm works easily the shortest hours - but he works like stink and if the product demands it he will work a "late" to get a feature out the door.
Usually, though, he has already got it done.
I've found that hours worked is a poor measure of product devotion :)
> I feel that we hired someone who wasn't sold on the whole startup thing, and treated an early stage startup as if it were a regular job.
Or maybe he realized that working long hours on the same thing with no breaks would actually bring productivity down below what a normal 40 hour week would after just a few weeks. You know, maybe he actually kept up on the science of productivity.
[citation needed]
Really? This information is over 100 years old in some cases. Here's a few links I found quickly. The first one has a lot of citations itself.
http://archives.igda.org/articles/erobinson_crunch.php
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/archive/5190.html
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/05/the_productivity_myth.html
It seems to me that it's come up several times that in your company you chose to follow what you thought was right instead of actually researching it. I hope you can correct this before future ventures.
I apologize for my flippant remark above. People aren't getting what I'm trying to say in this thread, and my remark reflected that.
The key part here is that it's not sustainable long term. It would be silly to optimize for long-term productivity with launch looming and features unimplemented.
According to the latest research I've seen, you start dropping productivity within a couple of weeks of over work. You were in this mode for months, no?
Personally yes, same for my co-founder. However, the employee under discussion had only just started.
(and a quick reminder here that we're not discussing the employee's passion for the startup--which everyone would agree was low--not his "goodness" as a human being or as a developer.)
I think it's just that people show their intrinsic motivation in different ways.
I consider developing to be a creative kind of job, one where more arse-in-seat time means lower or even negative productivity. Our designer gets off with even less work than my developers. It's about keeping a fresh mind so you can churn out your best stuff. Instead of churning out a lot of mediocre stuff.
Perhaps when we're big enough to have code monkeys there will be time for people wanting to spend such insane hours working :)
> I consider developing to be a creative kind of job, one where more arse-in-seat time means lower or even negative productivity.
As much as I would like to believe this, I don't think it's true. Looking at people who do PhDs, including myself, they work 60-80 hour weeks because you can get more done in that time than working 40 hour weeks. Every startup founder ever has worked extremely long hours. Googlers and Mozillians are in the office long past 5pm.
Certainly your productivity drops on a sliding scale probably after 20 hours of work, but to suggest that 100 hours does not get more done than 40 is pure fiction.
There was a great post here a while back that said that research showed not only does total productivity start to decline if you go too far beyond 40 hour weeks on a prolonged basis but (and this is the kicker) your subjective evaluation of your productivity gets out of whack so you're less productive but you think you're more productive.
If you’re trying to get a PhD and your advisor expects you to work 60-hour weeks, then you either work 60-hour weeks or you consider a different path in life. That speaks volumes about what it takes to impress your superiors in a semi-feudal institution, but not much about productivity.
Personally I think that 40 is a little low. Especially considering you aren't working at 100% all the time. For me the sweet spot between a creative brain and enough churning-out-code is 60 to 70 productive hours a week. These include things that aren't strictly work work, but help with serendipity and ideas.
This all seems to me that you were trying to hire a machine. They will work on weekends and evenings without too much complaint, but form my experience as an employee, there are very few humans willing to work those kinds of hours and be happy about it. On an odd occasion when needs must, yes, but every day and every week will always lead to the inevitable. For most people (and maybe even more so in the UK), working at a startup is just another job, maybe not to you, but to them it will be. I also found as a PhD student those who worked longer hours never finished any quicker than those who enjoyed their time a little more - this is only my personal experience though. Maybe one of your biggest mistakes was not understanding people as well as you think you do - I dunno.
Paul, you mention that you weren't motivated to make the business succeed: "[O]ur motivation to make a successful company got destroyed by all of the above." But you also mention that you were working 100-hour weeks. Do you think you had sufficient motivation to work, say, 60-hour weeks?
This is roughly what WePay, another YCombinator start-up, worked and called "Khang's hours".
http://blog.wepay.com/2010/09/the-obligatory-wepay-%E2%80%9C...
I think the subject matter was the important bit. News wasn't our thing. 60 hour weeks are pretty easy if you enjoy the subject, and 80 hour weeks would even be fine. 100 hour weeks probably shouldn't ever be used long-term.