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Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

The studies I've seen show productivity falling at 40 hours and dropping off a cliff at 50 for most activities.

I don't think the blame for the workaholic culture lies primarily with VCs, though some do encourage this. I think it's mostly a part of the cult of male ego. "I worked 70 hours last week! How many did you work? 50? Wuss! I'm so much more hard-core than you!"

People also lie about how many hours they worked. In reality they work maybe 20-40 and then do things like... uhh... hang around in here... for the other 20-40. Again part of the macho one-upmanship thing... putting on an act of working ridiculous hours to look hard.

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"I'm so much more hard-core than you!"

Its a grind game. Obviously my WoW character level 70 is far superior to your WoW character level 50.

Unfortunately companies can be killed by this kind of primitive behavior when the 70 hour/week guy executes less shareholder value add than a 20 hour/week intern.

Give someone a stupid metric to aspire to, they'll max it. Might destroy the company in the process, maybe even themselves or their own careers, but they'll max the metric number, thats for sure.

Reminds me of the old metric for code productivity from aeons ago, the K-LOC (thousand lines of code).

If one programmer does in 50 lines what takes another programmer 5000, should that programmer make less?

Grinding in WoW is at least fun and you get to socialize...

I've run into this before as well, where guys will brag about how much (unpaid) overtime they put in, how early they get to the office in the morning, etc. I feel pity for them, not respect.

> In reality they work maybe 20-40 and then do things like... uhh... hang around in here... for the other 20-40

So much this.

There's just a huge level of inefficiency with working ridiculous hours on a regular basis. Just because you're engaged in the physical act of coding/designing/writing/etc. does not mean you are producing anything of value. In reality you'll probably do something that needs to be fixed a week or two down the road.

I've watched people who work till 9pm everyday. After 5:30 or 6 they mostly just browse the internet and fiddle around. In reality they should probably work from 8 or 9 - 5 or 6 and take a healthy 3 to 4 hour break and go home. Then after their evening has settled down get back into working on something for another hour or two at the leisure of their own home. This is much more productive than just slugging it out at the office with no work life balance at all.

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