Apple's Phil Schiller Works 80 Hours a Week Overseeing App Store | Hacker News Reader

Apple's Phil Schiller Works 80 Hours a Week Overseeing App Store

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26 pointshavaloc48 comments

Nobody works 80 hour weeks. It’s just that these people have a weird interpretation of what constitutes “work”. I recall reading an article about some exec and they even considered their meals to be “work” if they thought about work even a bit, it was really stretching the definition. If that’s how you interpret it, a lot of us in this industry are working much longer hours than what we get paid for. IDK about others but I don’t have an “off” switch in my head.

Ive worked a 110 hour week, a few 80-100 hour weeks.

But stable state more than 60 burnout is within a month.

That must also be some weird definition of work. Otherwise this doesn’t even leave time for meals, personal hygiene or for communicating with your s.o, let alone any kind of rest.

Not everyone has a s.o. In addition you can work remotely, order everything in, and nothing truly terrible happens skipping a week of hygiene.

I think I frequently have days like that if I add my side projects as work on top of actual work. I wouldn't want to spend that time on actual work as of now though.

I usually don't eat for the first 12 hours and then at some point eat everything I have for the day all at once. Kind of intermittent fasting, but not intentionally or for those reasons.

I.e. if I am excited about a particular side project I would do that.

So really depends on whether the work is exciting enough. If it is, this would be easy. It is rare if you are working for someone else or specifically a large company though.

If it is truly interesting work then you wake up focus completely in it and all of sudden it is end of day. In that case it is a little bit like an addiction where you just always have to build this one thing more, delaying eating, sleep, etc.

For usual work I would maybe only consider it if I was paid 4x the usual hourly rate for it.

My wife covered the slack that week and I'm 100% family after 6pm most nights

Covered the slack? I do not follow.

Edit: oh you must mean household chores, I was thinking about the App. That your wife was so pissed off she decided to cover the monitor your Slack was open on.

Agreed. I’ve put in days where I did nothing but work because the project was fun and also due in a week or very soon. Food really doesn’t take that long especially if you order in or pick up close by. Doing this consistently though would surely lead to burnout. Unless, of course, you just consistently love the project you’re working on. Even then, you need a break.

What's the point though of working so much you have no time left to live your life? Making money is just a means to be able to live IMO.

I completely agree but I will say that as somebody who intellectually understands that principle, overwork and burnout are still insanely common and arguably even rewarded in some work cultures / tech in general, and I screw this up a lot.

Even people who understand this rule / philosophy end up violating it if they're not careful.

... and with that I think I'm probably going to sign off for the day. It's late.

Cuz for some people work is fun. It's like asking a guy who likes fishing why he fishes so much. "But you've already caught enough for dinner...?"

There's different styles to it, depending on where you live, how your life is, and it means to "live your life" for you. E.g. you could have certain periods where you work really, really hard, and then you take a longer break, month, 3 months, 6 months, etc. Or you could work really hard to try and get an early state of financial independence. At that point living life becomes very easy, because you know you can just quit to do whatever you want, you are not dependent on anyone else so much less stress. Otherwise job market, your company state, leadership etc will be unnecessary stressors.

You worked 16 hours a day for 7 days? I doubt that - you would be getting only 3-4 hours sleep max?

I got about 5-6 hours of sleep, and meals were 10 minutes. Basically most waking hours for a week.

1 week of that is not that big a deal as long as it's not expected.

Don’t really understand the deniers here. I’ve also worked through weeks of literally waking up and building software until time to go to bed, 7 days a week. It is definitely possible, but it destroys you mentally. It was never the expectation that it would be the norm, so my wife was supportive.

Were you 63 years old when you worked like that, like Phil?

No, but I'm not talking about Phil. People here are claiming no one can work that much. You can, but it's not healthy or sustainable.

Millions of old guys work like that. The old dude who owns your local bodega probably works like that.

For him work constitutes for the most part just being at the bodega. I worked from home for about 5 years. I was at home nearly all the time, and did concentrated work 8-9 hours a day. Can I claim I actually worked 16 hours a day just because I was at home and there were deep learning training runs running in my garage? Of course not. When I say "work" I specifically mean _doing_ something, not just being there.

My father works partly 18h a day for several weeks only with breaks for fast eating and 3h sleeping. It's not like that he enjoys it much. But as a self-employed you have to work that much if you want to keep your customers (delivery date is in the quote, so you have to deliver). He has done that for the last 40 years haha since I know him never had been different.

I'm the same, I like to work.

The type of work they're doing is also radically different than what IC do.

When I was a manager, I could "work" longer days because I didn't need to do ask much of the deep, focused work that I did as an IC.

Yeah. ICs typically don’t consider answering BS on Slack or over email after work to be “work” at all, within reason

Although, it is work, and more annoying work than the actual coding I would think.

Nobody is a strong statement unless you mean just within tech. During residency I would pretty regularly work 10 hour days with 3 24+ call shifts that week on the ward. Like Monday 7am till Tuesday noon, sleep, regular Wed Thu, Friday Sunday call. Next week similar but Saturday call. Was brutal.

That seems dangerous for both you and patients.

It has been studied, and (surprisingly) restricting resident work hours to "only" 80 hours did not improve patient care / outcomes. One of the reasons is suspected to be increased number / frequency of "hand-offs," a high-risk time for information to be lost. Plenty has been written on the topic.

n8henrie summarized it well. Its a basically a bandwidth issue. You might sign over 25 patients in 30 minutes... things get lost or miscommunicated which cascades to errors vs. being sleep deprived. Sick/new admissions get more time but still can only say so much. There is decent literature on signover tools to guide this process too. I used to joke second and third Mondays of working in a row should have a different name like SecondMonday and 3rdFnMonday. Thankfully never did a 3rd weekend in a row on call like that.

That _is_ dangerous for their patients. Quarter of a million deaths per year in the US are attributed to medical mistakes. Why they keep doing this IDK.

The are a lot of sources of error in the system other than long duty hours for residents and alternatives e.g. shorter duty hours introduce error at other points and individuals in healthcare. Should something be done? Sure, reducing error is obviously good but its simplistic to attribute it to this or think alternatives aren't worse. I personally also think the trend shorter duty hours in medical school and residency when you have that support is it's own problem of not learning enough to be as competent (and at the expense of career longevity for practicing physicians as inevitably all that gets dumped on the attending).

This was my first thought also: "Well somebody didn't do a residency..."

It is indeed how you define work. You can quibble if it has to be fully focused producing assets, back to back meetings or just thinking about work related stuff, but let’s take a simple one; what I get paid for on paper. I would say, if my pay slip says I worked 80*4 hours then I did. Meals are almost always work really; we sit together and talk code; I also think, at least where I live, breaks like meals are included in your contract as paid time, so I consider them work no matter what we talk/think about.

I think a different view is; many of my none-IT acquaintances ‘work’ (in the definition you are looking at) maybe 1 hour a day, and get paid for 32-36 hours (never any overtime, ever, just exactly their contractual hours). But they would say they work 5-6 hours a day. They think I am crazy for working 8+.

Realistically, focused asset creating hours, I do 3-5 hours (usually early in the morning), but I easily spend 5 hours just chatting with my colleagues helping them and they me. Doesn’t burn me out for the past 30 years; it would do if I was forced 8 hour focused asset producing.

My definition of work is what hours a hourly paid factory line worker would be paid for. Extending that to sitting in front of computer and sitting in person in meetings or in some pod.

Same hours the people physically building their products are paid for in this case.

I don’t know what exactly he’s doing spending all this time though. There are no positive results to show, including for Apple itself (it gets embarrassed quite often by App Store mess-ups).

Whoever’s actually been in charge of the App Store and running it has been doing a terrible job for a long time. Unpredictable app review durations, unpredictable app review feedback, unpredictable and grossly wrong app rejections, not handling reports about really malicious apps (that either charge like tens or hundreds of dollars per week or violate App Store rules on privacy or do something else that’s bad)…the list is quite long.

Apple hasn’t invested as much as it should on the App Store. This leaves it with disgruntled app developers, disgruntled customers and disgruntled governments.

It seems like it’s a bit too late for Apple to salvage this situation. Years and years of neglect in the pursuit of profits is finally catching up. Without an overhaul of the entire team right from the top, this down slide is not going to be arrested (it’s questionable it could be even with an overhaul, because of Apple’s thinking process and blind spots).

What a loser. Retire with your billions and spend some time with your family or something.

Exactly. There’s probably some VP under him who’s like 60 and feels like he’ll never get a shot at Phil’s role. And some 40 year old Director under him who has been waiting for a promotion to VP forever, and managers under her, and so on. All on hold because it has to be the same cast of characters at the top for a decade. When the Old Guard calcifies and doesn’t bow out gracefully, it logjams an entire tree of employees hoping to become the New Guard.

This is good as it’ll encourage people to hopefully leave and start other competitive ventures. Hubris destroys all human endeavors, why should businesses be immune to it?

> And some 40 year old Director under him who has been waiting for a promotion to VP forever

As far as I know, that would be Ann Thai, product director for App Store and Apple Arcade.

Sounds like the dude needs to learn how to delegate

I love when <works ridiculous hours> is presented as some kind of flex. It isn’t. It is a reliable indicator of chronic mismanagement, not only of their own time, but of the time and capability of everyone else around them. Guaranteed these folks didn’t get their job on actual merits - possible perceived merits, sure, but again guaranteed that scratching the surface will reveal all kinds of nasty.

In this case - the App store is a case in point. It is a financial success despite, not because of its’ management, and the many myriad of ills that beset the App store (and have been for a very long time) clearly show this to be the case.

You're painting yourself a very vivid picture of this man based on zero first hand experience.

Hey Phil, you're doing it wrong.

Can you really do excellent work when you work 80 hrs a week? If you have to do hands-on work then I can see how someone might be a bit more productive. But executives are supposed to plan and let their department execute. I would have thought that someone at his level would be better at delegating.

That's sad, I hope things improve for him soon.

Source WSJ article: https://archive.is/TX53x

I thought he stepped down to take the role of fellow and Joz took his old marketing job? Two very competent people I will say.

https://www.apple.com/leadership/greg-joswiak/

The article acknowledges that, but also reports that he's working 80 hours a week.

Anything less doesn’t keep a job at Apple even in quasi retirement.

How many of those hours are spent golfing with other executives?

Clap. Single.

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