question: the 40 hour work week vs Silicon Valley?

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.

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.

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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 suspicion is that 40+ hour workweeks are possible given the right kind of work and motivational structure: http://blog.nickwinter.net/the-120-hour-workweek-epic-coding-time-lapse Note that in the post, Nick Winter describes enjoying his work. My guess is that you should work on finding your work enjoyable and energizing before attempting to crank up the number of hours you work.

The claim that people can spend a ridiculous number of hours playing computer games is less controversial, and computer games often have significant intellectual content. If doing your work was hedonically similar to playing a computer game, I imagine that'd make it easier to work long hours. I've also found myself to be more creative and efficient when I find my work enjoyable--I work both harder and smarter.

I haven't solved the problem of finding my work enjoyable all the time, but if you don't have any ideas on making this possible, maybe try reflecting on your aversions and internal motivational structure. I've had success with listening to calm.com while working and trying to notice when more than one thing is competing for my attention and cutting it down to just one, for instance.

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 continuous work drastically reduce cognitive function and increase the chance of catastrophic error. In both the short- and long-term, reducing sleep hours as little as one hour nightly can result in a severe decrease in cognitive ability, sometimes without workers perceiving the decrease.

Managers decide to crunch because they want to be able to tell their bosses "I did everything I could." They crunch because they value the butts in the chairs more than the brains creating games. They crunch because they haven't really thought about the job being done or the people doing it. They crunch because they have learned only the importance of appearing to do their best to instead of really of doing their best. And they crunch because, back when they were programmers or artists or testers or assistant producers or associate producers, that was the way they were taught to get things done.

Another good article about the history of the 40-hour work week is Why We Have to Go Back to a 40-Hour Work Week to Keep Our Sanity on AlterNet. I recognize the political leaning of AlterNet may be offputting to some, so consider yourselves warned. I also don't necessarily endorse their theory that Asperger's Syndrome is to blame for the rise of overwork in Silicon Valley.

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' free-lance hours - more is not sustainable with 4 children. But many days I sit behind my PC 4 to 6 extra hours (often in thenight because I need less sleep). These are productive hours mostly. Coding, researching, learning, LW. Also on weekends. If a topic interests me I can keep up flow and concentration 16 hours straight. It is just for my family streak that I don't work insane business hours.

And I guess there are other people our there that are alike. Thus normal workplace lessons don't apply here.

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 last problem. If you keep the work-day to 8 hours, it's hard to maintain that sense of drive.

Ideally, you maintain a sense of drive for the 8 hours (going over occasionally as needed) -- if you can manage that, it's the best combination.

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.

Average productivity or total productivity?

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 telling your workers to bloody well lay off the coding at home) would probably get you more, better and less buggy lines of code added to your product per week, that doesn't really help you if it looks to the people funding you like you are treating their investment as a nine to five.

"Sophisticated investors should know better"? Eh. The only skill that actually matters to the long term success of a startup investor is the ability to pick startups with good product ideas. The kind of investor who is an expert on productivity and employee management is most likely picking investments based on those factors in some other industry where that is what companies live or die by. Meaning, an industry which is mature.

This of course implies that the optimal strategy for a startup is to pick a good product idea and then just flat out lie through their teeth about how many hours of work they do per week. Does it sound very implausible that a lot of the silicon valley culture of overwork is fiction? And some of it is naive people trying to actually work as many hours as people more cynical about investor relations falsely claim to.

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, Silicon Valley firms go just the other way, doing everything they can to keep employees in the office by making it "fun" - that's the opposite of what a signalling explanation would predict, but strongly predicted by an "extra time in the office really is productive" theory.

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 worth it.

In contrast, the employee at a typical large corporation wants to have his job (or a very similar one) and his salary (or one somewhat higher) for the next ten years and his employer similarly wants to have the continuous use of his labor.

A good rule of thumb is that if somthing seems insane or just wrong, consider the incentives involved. Many times it is actually insane, but just writing it off as so, doesn't help you understand it.

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 actually say what people claim they say?

As a side note, what do you people do on your free time? Unless you're letting your brain idly daydream much of what you do on your free time could be considered hard work by others.

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). Why is this unreliable? Because working longer hours produces more artifacts of work, even when it produces less deliverable work. You have all these memories of being in an office, more emails, more comments in your bug trackers, etc. But how much work is done? Even if they did the experiment, there isn't a coherent way of measuring productivity of creative workers with n=1, almost all of us have quite a lot of variation in the complexity and familiarity of our work.

I know of only a couple people who have dramatically dropped their hours, and 100% of them are more productive (both more efficient and effective).

So there are people using almost no data (assuming they actually did measure themselves), and they claim to know better.

This is all to say, the startup ecosystem isn't thinking this through carefully. To the extent they end up being correct it will be largely coincidence.

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.