Hacker News Reader

Comment by CipherThrowaway | Hacker News Reader

There is a certain breed of exec who is extremely generous with what they consider work. They will read a few articles after dinner and consider it "working all evening." Staying up late idly scrolling through LinkedIn is "working past midnight." Their accounts don't differentiate between operational work and social activities that relate to work. For example, wining and dining a stakeholder is always considered several hours of pure work. Once I worked with a CEO whose "80 hour" weeks included regular binge drinking and 2am kebabs with his buddies on the board.

View on HN

Not to detract from the very good point you are making, but wining and dining stakeholders sounds exhausting. I would definitely consider myself "on the clock" for such an activity.

It's work under extreme pressure even for extoverts, and even hardened BD/relationship people. often it's extremely high stakes, and very little room for errors.

Those that think it's not work, I challenge you to close a multiyear, multi-billion deal with Boeing over a few dinners, and then tell us how it was just a walk in the park.

You can do it.

This ignores a large volume of low stakes business lunches and dinners and the propensity of business people to turn debriefs and meetings into leisurely lunches. I've been to many lunches and dinners like this and they feel like more of a psychological break than eating lunch in the common room. Plus the company pays.

If you're closing a high stakes multi-billion dollar deal with Boeing then you should count that as work, definitely.

I think it depends. If all these meetings are about closing deals with clients then sure. But execs engage in a variety of work related social activity. So dinner with another exec, grabbing a beer or coffee, turning a debrief into a lunch all count towards the self-reported 80 hours. A lot of outings with external stakeholders are also low stakes. I'm an introvert and I have never found these work related lunches and dinners anything close to real work. In addition, eating out on the company card relieves you of the personal work of preparing and shopping for meals on those days.

The problem in my view is not how we categorize work vs non-work but how people homogenize different types of work to create unrealistic expectations of what work is and how much of it we should be doing.

Yeah if you consider the person to be an introvert - it definitely would change the perspective on whether it is work or not.

People like to think that "work" is always doing things you dislike but it doesn't have to be.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com