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Comment by ripberge | Hacker News Reader

Treehouse is actually in a very luxurious position right now. They've raised a bunch of VC and this is a fairly new niche they operate in and more and more of society is recognizing how valuable these skills are. They can work minimal hours, see a lot of growth and everyone is happy.

Fast forward five years from now. There are going to be a ton of tough competitors in this space and eking out revenue growth month over month is going to be much harder. However, in five years they probably have the added pressure to start thinking about something called profitability.

The going is going to be a day of reckoning here when the harsh realities of cut throat competition set in. That just hasn't happened yet.

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> However, in five years they probably have the added pressure to start thinking about something called profitability.

We don't talk publicly about finances, but let's just say that's something that's been thought about already and that bit of what you're saying doesn't scare me.

> There are going to be a ton of tough competitors in this space and eking out revenue growth month over month is going to be much harder.

Codecademy (free), Code School, Pluralsight, Lynda, Udacity, Coursera, Udemy, free online content. Things are already tough, and they get tougher every day. We have an amazing team that works like crazy, 32 hours a week, because we believe we're uniquely situated to work on this problem. So the competition thing won't magically appear. It's already here.

Refreshing. After a burnout, I set to work 25h a day (program management role). I realized soon enough that I was crazy more efficient. I was also less stressed, less verbose, left all frustration behind, and started to see people change the way they saw me (= they started to like me).

It's a competitive advantage to offer less hours and more intensity.

I think you mean 25h a week, not day.

Or they're a unicorn or thunder lizard or whatever they're called these days.

It's interesting that you completely dismiss the hypothesis that they could actually be more productive in the fewer hours which I find quite plausible.

When the 40hr work week came in, it was in part pushed by industrialists because it produced higher productivity than longer hours. That was for relatively low creativity work.

Every investigation that I know of that has looked at this matter finds that working more than 40hrs a week gives you a relatively short boost (2 weeks or so) and within a few more weeks, you're producing less over your 60hrs than you would if you'd just worked 40 the whole time.

It's quite plausible to me that this is true for 32 hours too for particularly creative jobs.

It might actually be an advantage that helps them defeat the cut-throat competition to work a 4 day week.

Exactly. Enjoy happy fun time while it lasts.

Soon enough everything is a commodity and the Amazons and WalMarts of the world hire managers who's only possible goal is to eke out that last 2%.

I wish it wasn't like this, but I can't see it being otherwise.

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