I am also not writing code - which I think people just assume is the case. My role as founder is super varied, so in any given day I will do a meeting or two with investors, calls with the CTO, hangout meetings, design sessions, "brainstorming" or whatever you want to call a creative process, recruiting, reading industry news, reviewing financial statements, calls with customers, customer support emails, building presentations etc... I spread this out from about 830 AM to 1 AM with most of the work from 830AM - 5PM Break for dinner and family time from 5 - 830/9 then do some of the lighter work again from 9PM - 1 AM.
That works for me and my family. I have worked in much more stressful environments and can tell you for a fact that there is no dip in productivity - if anything, working less makes me antsy.
Edit: I do respect your work ethic, again I know I sound like a smart ass; but I'm just trying to understand. I couldn't physically work those hours and handle all of my responsibilities.
I met my wife in college and we had our three kids before I became a founder. We outsource a lot of the "maintenance" (lawn care, home repair, taxes) but I usually spend an hour of my day cleaning the kitchen.
Son's baseball means no dinner that night?
Yea, actually. We have to be really flexible with our family activities.
At any point in the day we are overloaded, which is fine with us but we have found ways to prioritize what we need to make it work. For example my wife goes rowing right after our kids go to sleep while I work and I respond to any kids if they wake up for a few hours.
It's just a super complicated juggling act.
good for you (but only if rest of your family truly agrees), but to me, you describe pretty much a nightmare. the few guys (in non-founder area) that were so super-performant, and were godsend for their employers, were actually shitty partners, friends and fathers. Your health is a good indicator if your mind is not stretching things too far. And last thing - for most women, it doesn't count how much time you spend with them, it's the time without, lack of intimacy that moves them into distance in relationships.
Try refactoring the linux kernel for 90 hours a week. Good luck.
Not saying that everybody should work 80 hours, just that this whole 'working more than 50 hours is less productive than working 40' is one of those extraordinary claims that require extraordinary evidence.
Because looking at the empirical evidence, it's the companies where people work long, hard hours are the successful ones, and not just in software... Try walking into a Cravath partner meeting, or John Hopkin's neurosurgery ward, and propose people go home after 40 because it would make them 'better' - you'd get laughed out of the room, is where I'd put my money.
I think there is value in companies that are 9-5, but those are not $BN high impact companies. The only major organizations with those hours are select government agencies.
Can we try a little harder than evidence-free correlation/causation here?
A quick look at the world's largest companies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_by_r... reveals that the secret of being in the top 10 for success is to be in oil&gas, or to be Walmart. Most Walmart employees are paid by the hour and subject to varying schedules outside their control. The highest tech company is Apple at 17.
Speaking of hourly pay, that is undoubtably a big reason why salaried staff are overworked: the extra hours are free to the company. It would be interesting to see how long "long hours" culture would last if every single staff hour over 40 hours a week had to be paid for. (Once we got past all the insistence that employees falsify timesheets, of course)
I'm not even talking about field jobs though. Analysts, developers and white collar workers inside Exxon are generally expected to put in massive hours.
I'm a geologist and I've worked for three of the majors. I've seen good work conditions and I've seen terrible. (This is all office-based work, too. Things are a _lot_ rougher in the field.)
Essentially all geologists are in the "upstream" side of things (i.e. finding oil/gas and getting it out of the ground). Upstream has three segments (exploration, development, and production), and the work-culture depends a lot on which one of those you're in.
At least in my experience, in exploration things are very schedule-driven. You work crazy hours all the time to meet arbitrary deadlines. Supposedly, we work a 9/80 schedule and get every other Friday off. No one is allowed to take those... It's 7-5 six days a week, and more when it's crunch time. Taking "vacation" means working from home or only coming in for half a day. We're required to code our vacation every year, but I've regularly seen people forced to work through 100% of their vacation time.
Development (oilfield development, not software) is typically a bit more paced. Most of the work will be on a very regular schedule, except for when you're responsible for a well that's being drilled. If you're sitting a well, you're on-call 24/7 for a few weeks. You will have lots of 10pm, 2am, and 6am conference calls and then go in and work a full day. However, you'll typically be told to not show up at the office for a week or so afterwards (that's always informal -- the majors all have strict no comp time rules).
The other segment of upstream is production. I've never worked production, so I can't comment there.
I'm currently in R&D (software development, actually), and it's much more relaxed. We have our own personal hell in terms of the amount of paperwork and meetings that are required to do _anything_, but the hours are more reasonable.
At any rate, the big companies are all effectively 20-50 semi-independent small companies, in my experience. The work culture between those small companies will vary wildly.
e.g. In software, in my 80th hour, I could quite easily write some code that was bad, that takes longer than an hour to work out is bad. Code that wouldn't have been written wrong if I had been thinking clearly. Hence is net negative in terms of productivity.
(not saying that the point at which productivity goes negative at the 80h mark however.