You'd expect Silicon Valley working practices to be less optimal than those in mature industries, because, well, the industries aren't mature. The companies are often run by people with minimal management experience, and the companies themselves are too short-lived to develop the kind of institutional memory that would be able to determine whether such policies were good or bad. Heck, most of SV still follows interview practices that have been actively shown to be useless, to the extent that they've been abandoned by the company that originated them (Microsoft). Success is too random for these things to be noticeable; the truth is that in SV, being 50% less efficient probably has negligible effects on your odds of success, because the success or failure of a given company is massively overdetermined (in one direction or the other) by other factors.
The only people in a position to figure this kind of thing out, and then act on that knowledge, are the venture capitalists - and they're a long way removed from the action (and anyone smart has already left the business since it's not a good way of making money). Eventually I'd expect VCs to start insisting that companies adopt 40-hour policies, but it's going to take a long time for the signal to emerge from the noise.
and anyone smart has already left the business since it's not a good way of making money.
Can you elaborate? The impression I've gotten from multiple converging lines of evidence is that there are basically two kinds of VC firms: (1) a minority that actually know what they're doing, make money, and don't need any more investors and (2) the majority that exist because lots of rich people and institutions want to be invested in venture capital, can't get in on investing with the first group, and can't tell the two groups apart.
A similar pattern appears to occur in the hedge fund industry. In both cases, if you just look at the industry-wide stats, they look terrible, but that doesn't mean that Peter Thiel or George Soros aren't smart because they're still in the game.
You'd expect Silicon Valley working practices to be less optimal than those in mature industries, because, well, the industries aren't mature.
On the one hand, yes. On the other hand I expect the working practices of mature industries to have been formed during the times of typewriters and three-ring binders.
It's of course possible that this Bock guy knows what he's doing on the hiring front. But in these interviews he has no incentive to give Google's competitors coherent helpful information on how to hire people - and every incentive to send out obfuscated messages which might flatter the preconceptions of NYT readers.
I've pointed out in the past that in the Google context, range restriction is a problem (when everyone applying to Google is ultra-smart, smartness ceases to be a useful predictor), so Bock could be saying something true & interesting in picking out some other traits which vaguely sound like IQ but aren't (maybe 'processing speed'?), but then he or the writer are being very misleading (intentionally or unintentionally). I don't know which of these possibilities might be true.
Everyone who applies to Google is not ultra-smart. Far from it.
As a first-line interviewer, most people get rejected for being blatantly, horrifically incapable.
The perception that they are, unfortunately, causes many people who'd have a chance at acceptance to not even try. Anyone reading this, if you've thought about applying to Google and decided you don't have a chance, please think again! The opportunity costs are really low, and potentially negative; worst case you'll get a bit of interviewing experience.
I agree that it's surprising that (1) working long hours seems to have been found ineffective in academic studies and yet (2) businesses tend to want it. Aside from startups, I remark that the finance industry is notorious for extremely long working hours, and yet you'd have thought that (say) a hedge fund could benefit a lot from having its very expensive very smart people working more effectively if shorter hours would achieve that.
One possibility I've wondered about is that maybe it's about latency rather than bandwidth. In other words: If you're at work for shorter hours, then you may get more done but when someone else needs you -- especially if it might be someone else in a different timezone -- then they may have to wait a lot longer, and that may end up outweighing your greater individual productivity.
(I think I've seen something very like this offered as an explanation for investment banks' punishingly long hours: one of the things an i-bank's clients are paying a lot of money for is knowing that at any time they can call up the person who's trying to put together a deal, and discuss it with them. That means that those people need to be around for long hours, which means that the people doing analysis for them also need to be around for long hours. I have never worked in an investment bank and do not know how credible this is.)
Not being a programmer, I don't know if this is relevant to silicon valley in particular, but people in general overestimate how many hours per week they work, and the greatest exaggeration is found among the people reporting the longest hours.
Great find. From the NYT summary:
Men estimated spending a total of 23 hours on housework per week, versus the 10 hours they actually spent when forced to keep a time diary. Women estimated 32 hours versus 17 hours in the diary.
In contrast, many tech companies in silicon valley demand (or 'encourage', which is the same thing in practice) much higher work times. 70 or 80 hours per week are sometimes treated as normal.
Do you have data on this? It's not something I've observed at any of the small number of Silicon Valley tech companies I've worked at.
It's tempting to think that because Silicon Valley is a center of growth for the economy, if things are done a certain way in Silicon Valley, that's the best way to do them. But Silicon Valley has lots of unusual stuff going on. Some things hurt, some things help, and on balance the unusual stuff seems to help more than it hurts. Also, different companies do things differently.
Are these companies simply wrong and are actually hurting themselves by overextending their human resources? Or does the 40-hour week have exceptions?
See this Quora question answered by people who ought to know: https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-optimal-working-hours-in-an-early-stage-startup-in-terms-of-hours-per-person-per-day-if-you-want-to-maximize-chances-of-success Possible sampling bias: people who are busy working long hours successfully didn't answer the question.
My s...
I would probably be able to get the same amount of work done in a 30 or even 20 hour week, given the amount of time wasted on meetings/email/waiting for data in an average office. Boss wouldn't want to pay me the same for a 20hr work week though.
Are these companies simply wrong and are actually hurting themselves by overextending their human resources?
Yes, unquestionably. We've known how human productivity works for over 100 years now. This knowledge has been "forgotten" due to the effects of tough, largely unprotected labor markets. If the guy at the next desk over stays an hour later than you every day, he'll look like he's working harder, so he'll be less likely to get laid off. Once you have multiple people thinking that way and no opposing structure to encourage cooperation, you get a classic status arms race.
Why Crunch Modes Doesn't Work: Six Lessons
...Executive Summary
When used long-term, Crunch Mode slows development and creates more bugs when compared with 40-hour weeks.
More than a century of studies show that long-term useful worker output is maximized near a five-day, 40-hour workweek. Productivity drops immediately upon starting overtime and continues to drop until, at approximately eight 60-hour weeks, the total work done is the same as what would have been done in eight 40-hour weeks.
In the short term, working over 21 hours continuously is equivalent to being legally drunk. Longer periods of conti
I suspect that being young and having a high IQ (which is correlated with good health) raises the number of hours you should work if your goal is to maximize output. Plus, Modafinil, Adderall, and caffeine probably play a role here.
The value of having a 40 hour work week probably depends on what you do in the other hours of the day.
If you spent all the time outside of work relaxing you will get more productive than if you spend your time outside of work in highly stressful activities.
If you employ a computer programmer who spends 80 hours per week in front of a computer regardless of whether he has a 40 hour or 80 hour work week, it might make sense to ensure that all of those hours are spent of his work.
Opensource programming in his free time comes likely out of the same budget of mental resources.
Can you link some of these studies? I am very interested in understanding why we work the amount we do.
I think silicon valley is an atypical example compared to the typical workforce. We are presumably talking about the high end of the technological productivity spectrum. And as we know the tails come apart. I'd guess that a lot of special people cluster in these jobs. Sure the tech companies try a lot to make work convenient - but I think a lot of the people working there are at least partly such highly productive because they invested lots of time into technology all their life. Working long ours in your calling is normal.
Look at me: I work 40 'normal' ...
Two words: Interindividual differences.
They also recommend 8-9 hours sleep. Some people need more, some people need less. The same point applies to many different phenomena.
One argument for a longer work week:
You always have to do a fixed baseline of background work: Answering emails, meetings, filling out the forms for your company dental plan. Say that's 20 hours. So, a 60-hour week is not 50% more quality work-time (coding, etc.) than a 40-hour week, it is 100% more. Of course, it's best to arrange things to minimize the scut-work and focus on the highest-value effort.
Another argument: You want to avoid clock-watching. When you're hyped up, you work longer hours because you have the momentum and the urge to fix that one ...
I don't care this much about maximizing output for my company, period. I've been careful to avoid more Hill and SF-type take-over-your-life jobs, because I get a lot out of my flexible time (writing a book, offering hospitality to others, seeing theatre, building things) that I would not get out of a job and that are difficult to trade money for.
I work at Google, and I work ~40 hours a week. And that includes breakfast and lunch every day. As far as I can tell, this is typical (for Google).
I think you can get more done by working longer hours...up to a point, and for limited amounts of time. Loss in productivity still means the total work output is going up. I think the break-even point is 60h / week.
In the videogame industry they have 80 hour work weeks all the time. They can get away with it because of employee turnover. If you burn out and quit, there's a line of people who'd be happy to take your place.
In other areas you still have managers and executives whose performance is evaluated on short-term results, so they will push the team to work hard, gain political points and move on.
Theory: It's all about signalling commitment to investors. A startup doesn't produce anything until it goes gold on it's product or gets bought out by a tech giant who then takes their product to completion. So it has no cash flow at all until hopefully at the end a dump truck full of money pulls up and buries everyone in wealth. Up until that day, what pays salaries - what keeps your company employees from starving to death in the street - is investors who believe in your idea and your product. And while working a forty hour week for the duration (and t...
Have you studied Robin Hansons post over on OB? Some interesting stuff, some studies and sources. http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/12/work-hour-skepticism.html http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/12/construction-peak-60hrwk.html http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/12/why-work-hour-limits.html
Do you know of any studies that address these issues?
In a sense, Silicon Valley is an ongoing study. Here you have a very large number of firms in a competitive environment, with low cost of entry, each firm looking for a productivity edge over their rivals. If holding the work-week down to 40 hours really made their employees more productive, don't you think you'd see lots of successful firms that have tried it?
And yes, I'm aware that there's signalling going on, but you'd still expect to see some successful firms that worked like that. Moreover, Silic...
Increasing the work week generally provides a short-term and more easily measured benefit (getting this project done sooner) but long-term and harder to measure harms (higher error rate and higher maintenance cost). Bean-counters are notoriously bad at trading off short-term benefit for long-term harm, and at preferring benefits which are easy to measure.
The problem is that during the industrial revolution it also took a long time because people caught on that 40 hours per week were more effective. It is really hard to reliably measure performance in the long term. Managers are discouraged from advocating a 40 hour work week since this flies in the face of the prevailing attitude. If they fail, they will almost definitely be fired since 'more work'->'more productivity' is the common sense answer, whether or not it is true. It would not be worth the risk for any individual manager to try this unless the order came from the top. Of course, this is not an argument in favor of the 40 hour week, it just shows that this could just as well be explained by a viral meme as by reasonable decisions.
This is part of the reason why I find it so hard to find any objective information on this.
This is a theory that has been around for a hundred years
Do note that a hundred years ago workers performed mostly physical labor and estimates of physical endurance do not have to be similar to estimates of mental endurance.
Probably has something to do with the American work morality--the zealousness we apply any religion can only weep in envy of. We believe/have been brainwashed into believing work is what we were born to do. As to how much we should do; I'm not sure this is a question for psychological studies so much as a question of how much (and of what kind of) work we actually want to do. It's like asking how many hours one should spend cleaning their house; one balances a cleanliness level one can live with against time one would rather spend doing something else.
Remember that in issues of optimization, the question is always, "for what am I optimizing?" Startups have to scale as quickly as possible, or they'll run out of money or be supplanted by a competitor. A startup team pumps all their effort into a 2 to 5 year period, after which point they'll likely have achieved dominance in their market, been bought by a larger company, or failed. The game is short, and the payoff is bimodal (either very high or close-to nothing). Workign one's self into the ground for a few years to come out a millionaire maybe...
The 40 hour work week is a sweeping kind of a claim you wouldn't accept in any other context. It's like saying that to maximize the benefits of physical exercise, you shouldn't work out more than 10 hours a week, then proceeding to ignore the type of benefit you're looking for, anatomy, intensity, intervals, session length, fun, safety, individual talent etc.
I've seen frequent claims on LW that shorter hours are better for productivity, but very little data to back them up. Why don't people quote some studies so that we can scrutinize them to see if they a...
I'd like to note the sheer volume of people in the wider startup ecosystem generating reasons why they are smarter than science when this is brought up.
Let's investigate how little "evidence" they need before they completely ignore said research:
Many have the unmeasured, ridiculously unreliable anecdata "I produce amortized peak output working at a higher number of hours per week" (it's hard to tell that anyone has actually tried looking before claiming it, though: work 6 months at 40 hours/week and another 6 months at 70/hours a week...
For these kinds of startups, everyone working is also an investor or owner or is otherwise hitched to the startup's survival. Working extra long hours can be a signal to investors in two ways. First, the workers believe in the idea enough to work double time. Second, the path to knowing whether the investment is worth another investment round will come sooner.
Conventional wisdom, and many studies, hold that 40 hours of work per week are the optimum before exhaustion starts dragging your productivity down too much to be worth it. I read elsewhere that the optimum is even lower for creative work, namely 35 hours per week, though the sources I found don't all seem to agree.
In contrast, many tech companies in silicon valley demand (or 'encourage', which is the same thing in practice) much higher work times. 70 or 80 hours per week are sometimes treated as normal.
How can this be?
Are these companies simply wrong and are actually hurting themselves by overextending their human resources? Or does the 40-hour week have exceptions?
How high is the variance in how much time people can work? If only outliers are hired by such companies, that would explain the discrepancy. Another possibility is that this 40 hour limit simply does not apply if you are really into your work and 'in the flow'. However, as far as I understand it, the problem is a question of concentration, not motivation, so that doesn't make sense.
There are many articles on the internet arguing for both sides, but I find it hard to find ones that actually address these questions instead of just parroting the same generalized responses every time: Proponents of the 40 hour week cite studies that do not consider special cases, only averages (at least as far as I could find). Proponents of the 80 hour week claim that low work weeks are only for wage slaves without motivation, which reeks of bias and completely ignores that one's own subjective estimate of one's performance is not necessarily representative of one's actual performance.
Do you know of any studies that address these issues?