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Comment by rgbrenner | Hacker News Reader

If you only have seven good hours a day in you, does that mean the rest of the day that you spend with your family, reading, exercising at the gym, or whatever other virtuous activity you would be spending your time on, are all done poorly? No

I want to hear what Carmack's wife and kids think.

There's definitely a trade off... that he doesn't acknowledge that indicates to me that his own priorities entirely involve work.

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"Although John Carmack is a multimillionaire, and his company brings in close to $20 million a year, he is still a self-described workaholic. "I still work 80 hours a week," he admitted to Mark Lisheron of the Austin American-Statesman. "It used to be 80 hours on software, now it's 40 hours on software and 40 hours on Armadillo." Carmack did ease up a bit after he and his wife, Anna Kang, had their first child in 2004—he was getting home from the office at about midnight instead of 2:00 AM or 3:00 AM. Kang, however, insists that Sunday is family day, so Carmack compromises by reading technical manuals to his infant son. "

Unclear how relevant this is given it's age but it's the closest public information you'll find.

[1]https://www.notablebiographies.com/news/A-Ca/Carmack-John.ht...

Every time I read those type of comments from workaholics, I remember the article on top 5 regrets of hospice people [1]. I think that the age to burn the candle is between 18 and 30 or 35 at most. After that,fuck it, people should live their lives with their means, and work should only be enough to bring food and shelter to home.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2012/feb/01/top-fiv...

That list was compiled anecdotally by a single person, so I think we should take it with a huge grain of salt. It could be subject to confirmation/selection/reporting bias. For all we know, there could just as many or more people dying satisfied with their work accomplishments, or wishing they had worked harder.

>work should only be enough to bring food and shelter to home

What if you take the thing you love doing and make it your life's work?

To each one it's own I guess. I have been crazy passionate about computers for 30 years. Learnt on a Commodore with logo for kids My first computer had GWBASIC and I spent years and years of my life doing so many exciting thing with computers (i even got PHD!!)

But at 41 years old, my priorities have changed. I still get super excited by tech, that's why I advise startups in exchange of equity (so basically for free) and my day job is pretty neat as well (I play with ML, NLP, GPT and other AI technologies) .

But long gone are my days of working 10+ day hours. I sincerely prefer other way less technical stuff in life. I'm visiting my parents quite often, and enjoy spending a lot of time with my wife and kids.

Maybe my previous comment sounded very authoritative, but I just meant to convey my point of view. I have friends who have been working on their startups (as CEOs) like crazy for more than a decade, and they seem to like it.

Personally I just cant see myself wishing I had worked more in my deathbed. Specially for other people LOL. Naaah ,as I've grown older, I've learned to appreciate more the "earthly" things in my life.

What his comment is missing is that in families where both parents work outside of the home doing a job they are passionate about and would like to spend more time doing, they almost always are not able to work as much as they would like to, either on their actual work, or on side projects. I would love to only have to work 32 hours per week at my current salary and have one day per week to myself when the kiddo is in school. Sometimes I would use this to do "work" (maybe working on things I don't have time to get to in my day-to-day, learning new skills, having and working on side-projects), other times I would use the time to work on the house, do yard work, and other times I might go for a hike, or just sleep. Consistently having time to do activities like these would make me a better worker when I am at work, and a better parent and spouse when I am at home.

> what Carmack's wife and kids think

FWIW, they divorced a couple years ago.

Are you countering by saying 7 hours of work per day is too much to be able to spend quality time with your family after?

All time involves trade offs. None of it's free.

Well, yes, it often is.

Yeah, I mean every job and person is different. But as a blanket claim I think it's bogus and John's article seems to be pushing back against that in favor of a more nuanced perspective.

It's Carmack, though. He's so far out of the ordinary, I can't take any of his claims in this regards seriously. He's the outlier, and it's difficult from that position to write about what the average worker might be like.

He is only arguing against the idea that after a certain number of hours productivity becomes negative.

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