Item — HN Reader

I think everyone criticizing this is comparing it to the wrong thing. Many ambitious students:

-graduate and work 100 hour+ weeks as investment banking associates.

-join other people's startups where they work crazy hours

-work hellish hours in PhDs/med school/law school

Yes, being a founder is hard and can be absolute hell at times. But so are some of the "normal" things ambitious students already do post-graduation.

It's not like YC is saying you either do an internship with free lunches, corporate yoga classes and kombucha on tap or you dive into the trenches of being a YC founder.

3 comments

Yes, this is an excellent point.

No it isn't. I, and many I know, would never trade away 100+ hours at a namebrand investment bank/PE firm/consulting firm to work 100+ hours at a startup. It's not what I would recommend nor is it what many people I know would recommend, some of whom are billionaires. The constant advice is to always work at the best possible opportunity the first few years of your career, then step into entrepreneurship. You'll then have an idea of things actually work in the world. And I say this as someone who went the other way around (startup first before working in corporate).

I'm sorry but only at my most very dedicated periods of work did I work 100 hour weeks, and that was like 3 or 4 weeks tops. I highly doubt that anyone sustains a 100 hour work week for much longer. Eighty hour work weeks? Sure, that is doable, but sleeping at the job site because you are pulling a 100 hour work week is just not sustainable.

Rules changed in 2003, but until then medical residency programs routinely had doctors working 100+ hours a week or longer. In 2003 a cap of 80 hours a week was instituted along with a maximum of 24 hours in any given period, but programs found various loopholes around that cap which still had doctors working close to 100 hours a week. So further restrictions were placed so that over any 4 week period there's a hard cap of 320 hours, no exceptions.

At any rate, for most of the HN crowd who work a fairly routine IT or an office job, 80+ hours sustained for months and months might seem impossible, but join the military, work on a ship, work on a farm, work the oil fields, work in investment banking, work in a film crew which threatened to go on strike in 2021 for having 98 hour work weeks for months on end... and you find that while it's not common, it certainly happens in various fields.

Are residents and people working on ships actually making decisions for 100 hours a week? It's the cognitive load that I find difficult to believe about these numbers, not the

At one point I was also working crazy hours at a fast food shop. But that was only possible because I could "zone out" and just pour the customer's coffee and make sandwiches. Writing code for that long would have been impossible.

Obviously not every moment of every hour in a residents day is deep clinical thinking with high cognitive load, but we’re definitely not “zoning out” when making medical decisions. Patient statuses change very quickly and very often in the hospital, and every problem should be re-evaluated like it is a fresh concern. Decisions can be made quicker with more experience but you’re expected to be “on” all the time. Plus, lots of things contribute to cognitive load outside sheer medical decisions - social work, dispo issues, patient preferences, etc. Luckily my residency is closer to 60-70 hours a week but 100 is still common.

Remember - the 80 hour a week limit is not a max limit. It is the max hours per week AVERAGED OVER 4 weeks. You can easily work 100 hours this week if you do 60 the next.

> Are residents and people working on ships actually making decisions for 100 hours a week?

Residencies? Yeah. The guy who came up with the US' system for medical residency was high on cocaine pretty much constantly and expected everyone to perform at his level.

https://www.wolterskluwer.com/en/expert-insights/a-day-in-th...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Stewart_Halsted

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I'm sure prisoners in labour camps work more than that. And the death toll for patients cured by overworked doctors is not insignificant.

6 days / 16 hours or 7 days / 14 hours still leaves time for a normal sleep schedule.

Many of the people in our YC batch were doing this for the duration of the batch. My cofounder and I both have families and managed to make a similar schedule work (with more peaks and valleys).

The last few weeks have been a crunch where I’ve been getting a lot closer to a true 140ish. That is unsustainable and I’ve had to go into it knowing that the price is future productivity.

But as a student with no commitments, 100hrs a week feels like the norm in YC startups right now.

This is performance - the human brain doesn’t work like this.

I've frequently had points in my career where this is just life. It comes down to planning when you do which tasks. I'm absolutely not at peak decision making capacity, but sometimes you aren't making decisions, just executing on work that takes time.

You may have a family but how much time are you spending with them.

You know yourself but I think it's extremely unhealthy advice to give to people and usually hides a lot of inefficiency and misused hours.

Constraints breed creativity and efficiency. Do more with less and all that.

Have you done the exercise of "how can I produce the same value output in 80% of the time". The exact percentage doesn't matter, just doing the exercise to improve efficiency and have a more balanced approach. That also gives you space for actual crunch time whereas you seem to work in a perpetual state of crunch.

Is it real or is it performative? Are you taking care of health? Do you realize work is not everything to life and that you CAN have your cake and eat it too if you slightly balance it out.

Again, what you're doing might work for you but I'm trying to offer a slightly more nuanced take than what I consider it to be the "constant crunch" mode.

Busy doesn't mean value.

> Have you done the exercise of "how can I produce the same value output in 80% of the time". The exact percentage doesn't matter, just doing the exercise to improve efficiency and have a more balanced approach. That also gives you space for actual crunch time whereas you seem to work in a perpetual state of crunch.

My cofounder and I do this usually about twice a month where we sit down and purposefully think about this at a macro and micro level.

> Is it real or is it performative? Are you taking care of health? Do you realize work is not everything to life and that you CAN have your cake and eat it too if you slightly balance it out.

It's real! My health is not being taken care of, but that is the "pick 3" axis that I'm compromising on in the short term.

> Is it real or is it performative? Are you taking care of health? Do you realize work is not everything to life and that you CAN have your cake and eat it too if you slightly balance it out.

I think this is not the right way to think about it. People have different preferences. The difference between having 4m in the bank and 8m in the bank at the end of my career is very marginal to me. I would much rather put myself in the position to work towards a tail event.

Meh. I just don't believe that it is not performative and about "the hour metric" when on second read, I read the phrase about the really unsustainable thint being when you reached the "140 hours". In the last few WEEKS, plural.

4 hours sleep. Every day. And working non stop.

You can pretend all you want but for all that is holy stop giving this bullshit snake oil advice.

You don't have a life and neglect your family. They better enjoy those extra millions and buy themselves a father and a husband.

And somehow you seem to be defending it. Even though there is statistically a better return just working in a bank as a Java dev in a second tier city.

This is absolutely untrue. We pay ourselves and all of our employees competitive salaries.

See you paying them at least $335K in cash seeing that an average enterprise dev can make $140K working 40 hours a week and you want them to work 2.4x as many hours?

speaking only for recent graduates I know personally well: ambitious students also want to be writers, for example. If only it were so easy as writing more makes you a better writer! So if you have to sit around and get life experiences that are interesting to write about (a good way to be a good writer), do you want to do that while working for Stripe, drinking kombucha and getting free lunches and being able to live in New York? Yes. You don’t want to do that while being an investment banker or a doctor or a YC founder.

The thing is those kids still have massive cognitive gifts - I’m not going to use a loaded word like talented or whatever - and have worked very hard in the past. It’s just that the journey to the thing they want to do no longer rewards hours.

Paul Graham is like the Mr. Beast of seed investing. He wants to make the best SEED STAGE INVESTMENTS in the world, to mock a Mr. Beast PowerPoint. He doesn’t want to get the kids with the highest potential, or the kids who work the hardest. They are very sincere and supportive - I mean, who the hell in your life is willing to risk $525,000 on an idea with no traction?? - but they are not out to anoint a category of kids as the “ambitious” ones versus the unambitious ones. You can be ambitious about being a writer and find success and wind up writing very little!

> speaking only for recent graduates I know personally well: ambitious students also want to be writers, for example. If only it were so easy as writing more makes you a better writer! So if you have to sit around and get life experiences that are interesting to write about (a good way to be a good writer), do you want to do that while working for Stripe, drinking kombucha and getting free lunches and being able to live in New York? Yes. You don’t want to do that while being an investment banker or a doctor or a YC founder.

But nobody's closing that option, are they? YC is simply offering another path.

There are different kinds of ambitions of course. Not all of them are about money, some are about creative fulfillment or family or whatever. That's totally true.

But it's not like anyone's yanking those people out of their kombucha-on-tap associate job and forcing them into YC.

> If only it were so easy as writing more makes you a better writer!

One commonly repeated piece of advice that almost all successful authors state is to write a lot, a lot, a lot. Like just practice writing, it doesn't have to be good.

I hear this often said about many other creative endeavors as well, including painting, cooking, game development/design, etc... It often seems like really good artisans just pull greatness out of thin air, but that's because we often only see the successes, not the failures, but I am reminded that even the best writers, poets, and artists in general spend a great amount of time just creating content that no one will ever see.