Marissa Mayer says the secret of success is working 130 hours a week | Hacker News Reader

Marissa Mayer says the secret of success is working 130 hours a week

cnet.com

130 hrs requires you only get 5.4 hours of sleep a night, never eat, and never sleep. And that is assuming you don't take breaks on weekends.

Assuming a 5 day work week that means you are only getting 2 hours of sleep a night.

tl;dr Title should read "Marissa Mayer is full of shit and/or expects everyone else to live up to expectations she cannot meet herself"

I went through a six-month period where I was working 80-120 hrs/week. All I did was eat quickly and sleep when not working.

This did permanent damage to my metabolism. Towards the end, my body temp was dropping close to 95 deg while sleeping, and a few times I had trouble waking up. Should've gone to the hospital; any lower and your body probably can't warm up on it's own. Ever since that time my normal temp is one degree lower than it was before, and I've struggled with slow and steady weight gain.

The project was a success, but I wouldn't say that I've had success as a result of that effort.

Yes, if her definition of success is destroying the value of a company, then she is very successful.

> If success had a formula, everyone would follow it. If, indeed, work could be defined in some specific manner, everyone would know what it was.

No, they wouldn't follow it if the model for success is working 130 hours a week.

Most people, including myself, would just give out. Even if I knew there was some vast fortune and a windfall success in a year or two, I couldn't hack that kind of work load.

Yes, you could.

She's not a cobblestone paver working under the Sun. Her job is being a boss and do the bullshitting that comes with it while earning a couple millions every month.

Are you telling me you couldn't handle it for 1 year?

Interestingly, the kind of people who are willing to do this kind of thing usually do it for much longer than a year or however long it takes to accumulate more than enough money to never have to work again

I'm pretty sure I couldn't. If you literally work for 130 hours/week, you have less than 5.5 hours for hygiene, food, and sleep. So maybe 4 hours of sleep per day if you're really efficient at everything else and never leave the office. I couldn't get by on that for long.

Either Marissa Mayer doesn't sleep or she's grossly exaggerating.

I met a bunch of folks at Yahoo who had this same pretend-to-work-long-hours philosophy. If asked, they'd claim to work 10+ hours/day but actually showed up at noon and left at 7pm and rarely seemed to do anything from home. My interpretation was that long hours were expected and the easiest thing was to just pretend to be doing them.

Perhaps the secret of success she has is convincing the people around and under her that THEY need to work 130 hours a week.

In my personal opinion the code I've seen written by someone who worked 130 hours the previous week is complete crap. Working that much never gives you a moment to clear your mind and see the forest of your problem through the trees.

If you look at the history of Google [1], it's pretty clear that Larry and Sergey didn't work themselves into the ground. On the contrary, they did things like spending an entire day driving around Palo Alto taking pictures with a handheld camera.

The reason Google was successful was because of the creativity of the founders, which was nurtured by their playful attitude to work. Marissa Mayer seems to have completely the wrong idea about success, and Yahoo provides proof of it.

[1] http://www.slate.com/blogs/business_insider/2014/04/25/googl...

> Marissa Mayer seems to have completely the wrong idea about success, and Yahoo provides proof of it.

That's unfair. Yahoo was sinking long before Mayer, and numerous CEOs were unable to do anything useful to fix the situation. I'm not sure Steve Jobs could have saved Yahoo.

This pretty well mirror's PG's assessment of startups:

"Economically, you can think of a startup as a way to compress your whole working life into a few years. Instead of working at a low intensity for forty years, you work as hard as you possibly can for four. This pays especially well in technology, where you earn a premium for working fast." (1)

I've started or been a member of, I dunno, 7 or 8 startups at this point in a 20 year career.

The biggest success had the absolute worst work culture, longest hours, was the most detrimental to personal time, personal health etc.

The one with the brightest potential, best team, and best work/life balance was an utter failure.

(1) http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html

I've worked at a startup with poor work culture, long, long hours, and super detrimental to my time and personal health, and it crashed hard.

It gave me a lot of experience but I'm not sure the resulting poor health and burnout afterwards made it worth it.

Success is not guaranteed by working hard. At best, it increases your chances of success, and probably not by a whole lot.

I do not believe MM embodies or resembles what PG wanted to convey. Quantifying success by the number of hours put in reminds me of another greatly flawed analogy : Lines of Code as an indicator of software quality.

cause or effect? Could an otherwise doomed startup succeed by demanding 130 hour weeks? I think not. It's more plausible to me that the better things are working the more obsessive you are about working on them

Yeah cuz that worked out really well at Yahoo.

It worked out well for her, considering her personal networth from Google and Yahoo is probably over $500m now.

Did it really? That leaves barely 38 hours a week for vital things like: sleep, health, family time, friends, etc. You know, real life stuff™. She can't get those hours back, and given her "work ethic" seems happy to keep spending her deficit.

The thing about life is you get to define your own life's meaning. So I don't know if she's actually happy, but I do know that judging her life choices is a largely fruitless endeavour.

Counting working hours is a bit like using LoC to measure success. More helps but it definitely isn't a good KPI.

Working 130 hours a week will not make you successful, but if you are successful, you probably worked 130 hours a week. People are praising the wrong thing.

Probably? As in you know that more than half the people whom would be reasonably considered successful worked 130 weeks for a non trivial portion of their careers? I'm calling bullshit. I'd need to see a study. My belief is that work hours is one of the most common things to lie about these days. It's the adult version of how much you can bench

Sounds like the CEO at my work. I was working 75+ hours a week, no breaks (got a warning for taking them), using my own equipment just to keep up with the increased demands on me. Not paid for anything over 40 hours, minimum wage was almost double what I was paid.

When I complained about it, I was told that I could do the work or quit, because the CEO goes to bed at 2am and gets up at 6am, works all his other hours, and it's my problem if I can't keep up with the workload.

(It's worth noting that, in the end, he got his way and drove me to resign. Years later, I found out that what he does is illegal, but of course you don't mess with millionaires if you ever want to work again. Still have a couple of tricks up my sleeve, though.)

Yup, once you take the job you are at a tremendous disadvantage. You can quit but then you need to find a new job. If you quit the CEO just works the remaining people harder until you are replaced

I worked 106 hours a week for 2 years (three jobs) due to a lot of personal factors. It got so tiring I fell asleep standing up at a urinal, head resting on the water trap. I don't believe it is possible to do 130 a week for any continuous stretch of time. If that's how you "succeed", count me out.

That's 5h20 NOT working, 7 days a week... bs ?

5 mins to hurl something down your throat, and hired help for everything else. Everything. Else.

Also stimulants. Lots of stimulants -- and blood transfusions.

What are the blood transfusions for?

Tiger blood.

Of course the real secret is to be lucky enough to be one of the first employees at a company that is eventually worth more than $500 billion.

I doubt she worked 130 every week

I've done 110 - 120 for 6-8 months straight. Its doable. I ended up quitting that job in very large part, because I felt like I could fall into a trap where I never stopped doing that.

At that point, you've cut off so much of the rest of life, and you've started gaining such large monetary rewards (or else why do it?), that you can get caught in it, I think.

I can see this possible in a company where things are going well and you make a lot of money and your work is successful. I have worked at a startup where I pulled around 100 hours per week for 6 months and it ended with the company laying off almost everybody and all hard work being scrapped. Never again.

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