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Comment by kevsim | Hacker News Reader

As a startup founder in Europe, who works what I think of as a lot, but also finds time to make dinner for my kids and read to them at night, this type of article always gives me anxiety and/or guilt. Am I hustling enough? Is it wrong to watch Netflix on Saturday night instead of coding? What about that walk/workout - was there time for that?

We have users for our service [0], they're happy and they're paying us but it always makes me wonder if the competition is doing more and out hustling us. I guess there's no way to know and at some point you need to draw your own line in the sand in terms of work/life balance.

0: https://kitemaker.co, the super fast, hotkey-driven product management tool/issue tracker that has deep integrations to GitHub, Figma, Slack, etc.

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>As a startup founder in Europe, who works what I think of as a lot, but also finds time to make dinner for my kids and read to them at night, this type of article always gives me anxiety and/or guilt. Am I hustling enough? Is it wrong to watch Netflix on Saturday night instead of coding? What about that walk/workout - was there time for that?

The answer is "yes" to all questions. I don't know what the article author wanted to say, but she just reminded me personally that the US tech "scene" is not healthy.

For me, having a family with kids, I always look at Elon Musk : He does 80-hour work weeks. That's also my goal: 80 hours. He splits it between Tesla and SpaceX. I split it between my company and my family ;).

Since he was able to make both successful, we should be able to do that too :)

80-hour work week?!

Also, how do you know Elon Musk relationship with his family is successful?

You're missing what the parent comment said - they only have one company, so if Elon can run two companies, they should be able to run a company and a family

I don't think they are making any claims about Musk's relationship with his family- rather saying that 80 hour weeks let you succeed in two ventures- Musk pursued two companies- they are pursuing one company, and one family

Why compare yourself to Elon Musk though? If you could run like Usain Bolt, you'd be an olympic medalist ;)

In this case, the GP is implying that their goal is to work ~40 hours and spend ~40 hours with their family, give or take. I think that's quite sustainable.

The CEO literature (perhaps not startup focused) centers (iirc) around 55 hours per week. Which is still materially higher than the average worker but not fictitious. There’s mentions of 80 hours in this thread but actually go track your hours ... can you _average_ 80 over a year? Including vacations? Including sick weeks.

It’s very difficult. Doable but difficult.

As a corollary, don’t ask people how many hours they work. Ask: when do you go home? On Friday’s too? Do you work Saturdays? Oh yeah how much? And Sunday’s too? Same amount?

Then count.

Unless you have a few 2am nights and full weekend days it’s relatively difficult to reach 100 hours plus. When you actually count it gives more reasonable figures.

> Am I hustling enough?

Just because the answer is no doesn't mean it'll matter, it sounds like everything is going well either way.

A lot of people hate spending time with their families and work hard (literally and figuratively) to avoid the home. Or maybe what they call spending time with their families is 1 hour of fun and games while a WAG does 11 hours of completely inane child care. It would be inappropriate to generalize that people get more joy out of hour 2 of inane child care than they get joy from something that actually requires their intelligence or whatever. For women in the startup world this problem is extra acute, because they are choosing between 3 and 11 hours of inane child care, while most men only are only really choosing whether to have 0 or 1 hours of fun with their kids.

So I really sympathize with Tracy Young's perspective here. And she is putting things in a way that does not require making anyone out to be an antagonist, a kind of maturity most founders don't have.

Why do you keep calling child care inane? It's not stupid, or simple, and raising the next generation is literally the most important task. Diminishing the role of caretaker by calling child care inane is extremely offensive, especially to people who choose to devote their lives to the task.

I think GP intended and you have to read it in the context of, does it grow your business? The school of thought is anything that is not growing your business is inane, especially time consuming tasks, like child care. It's not an indictment on the importance of said task.

Here's my own perspective which is very different than most American startup scene: are you happy? Overall, in life.

There's this huge culture of work so hard you ignore your family/personal health/etc, but at least you created something. It's overrated.

On solution is to pick parenting book which will make you feel guilty for not spending enough time with kids or not giving them enough quality of time.

Pretty much regardless of how much time you actually spend with them.

Love the product, I've migrated our trello project there. The integration with Discord is awesome.

All this hustle porn is meaningless. Why are you doing it? Everyone is doing it to escape the system. Anyone that says different is lying to us or to themselves. You can't escape the system if it kills you first.

Pace is what is relevant here. You can probably get more done faster by putting in more hours. However for the vast majority of companies shipping something sooner rather than later really will not intact the company bottom line.

Lot's of deadlines are meaningless and do little but add stress. If you can get comfortable, and build a culture around, a more relaxed or even livable pace you will be much happier and have happier engineers.

Working longer hours, like hiring more engineers to a team, has diminishing returns. You can maybe sprint for a few months (I’ve certainly done it) but it takes years to see a startup through.

> Everyone is doing it to escape the system.

This really resonates a lot with me. Yet it's really rare to hear people talk about it in the startup world.

I think some people are also very ego-driven. For example, very young Steve Jobs said that he wants to be a very important person one day. That's not about getting FU money, that's about fueling an ego.

You’re right but he’s also a super outlier. I think people working on hard problems (like the Deepmind founders) also don’t fall into this category but they’re so few and far between that they’re a footnote.

> We have users for our service, they're happy and they're paying us

That is not a startup, that's an SMB.

Since I said nothing of our growth I’d say you can’t make that assumption

It depends on how you define a "startup". For me this term has nothing to do with growth rate -- simply, a startup is a company that is still looking for its (first) product-market fit.

Just to be clear, I didn't mean the previous comment in any disparaging way.

Took that one the wrong way - apologies.

I'm not sure we have something I'd call PMF yet. But again, that's all about your definition.

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