Comment by sp4rki | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sp4rki | Hacker News Reader

I wanted to know if hard work paid off so I worked from 10am to 12am

While I agree that an internship can be a great motivator (or an early de-motivator for people that chose the wrong career), I don't think this kind of extreme behavior should be encouraged. I'm not beneath doing extreme hours for a project, a few weeks ago I didn't leave the office for almost 72 hours to finish up some polishing of a product because of a sudden client imposed deadline. I did it knowing that I would then take a few days off and that it was an extreme measure to a extremely retarded requirement. It shouldn't be the rule since it can easily lead to tired and unhappy employees, and of course disgruntled employees who think they are being undervalued because they don't stay the same time the over-worker does.

If you have a very motivated employee, by all means let him do his overtime if he really wants to, but there has to be a line where you say "stop, go home". In any case, have some good luck looking for great interns. I'm pretty sure you can do wonders for all the new kids that're just starting out.

I don't know if its encouragement but its definitely what he did.

So we can take away one or two things:

1. His rapid maturity as a developer, and deeply expanded network came at a cost to time. If he had worked less, perhaps he would have known less people, been talked about less, and consequently had a smaller network. Also, the amount of time he put into the job might be directly related to the expertise he got out of it ("Practice makes perfect").

2. His type might just be your competition at an internship.

To be honest, while you're young spending 12 hours per day away from home isn't so bad. In high-school track, we'd regularly put in 3 hours mandatory after a 7 hour school day, then do one or two more hours if we were varsity. We were just teenagers.

Now adays, I can't imagine expending that much time on a single thing (school related stuff in this case), because I have so many competing interests but then single-minded devotion was the name of the game.

I never meant to say that the intern should not do such things. I just meant that it's not behavior to be encouraged on the workplace because it can have negative connotations that can hurt the social aspect of the team and/or can cause burnout which will inherently hinder productivity. If an intern wants to work 12 hours for any reason by all means let him. But if he's doing 12 hours + each and every day to basically prove his worth, there needs to be a limit before all parties come out losers in the relationship.

If the intern finds that he is learning a lot, having fun, and working with a great group of people, I don't see why s/he wouldn't want to spend 12-14+ per day working at a startup.

Disclosure: startup intern who commuted 3-4 hours per day.

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