> But if you work for Tesla, the minimum is really a 50-hour week and there are times when it'll be 60- to 80-hour weeks.
And we recently saw statistics here on HN proving that working more than 40 hours/week for long durations is counter-productive. Alas, I'm sorry to see Elon Musk falling for this "tough men work hard" nonsense.
I suspect that people who expect and look forward to working +50 hours/week would perform much better than people who are guilted into it. Also sounds like they're well compensated for it.
I don't think the special forces analogy holds water.
Consider this hypothetical example: If special forces train for 40 hours per week then they have a 70% chance of rescuing the hostages, but if they train 50 hours per week they have an 80% chance of success. Is it worth the extra cost? Absolutely. Having one special forces team with 80% chance of success is better than two teams with a 70% chance.
But now imagine that my job is to install headlights into a car chassis. If I work 40 hours per week then I can install 70 headlights, and if I work 50 hours per week then I can install 80 headlights. Is it worth the extra cost? No - two people installing 70 headlights per week is better than one person installing 80 per week.
Having said all that, it may be that "willingness to work 50 hours per week" is a good indication of passion and energy. If you ask a potential employee, "are you passionate?" the reply will always be "Yes". But if you ask, "Are you willing to work 50 hours per week" then you'll be more likely to get someone who loves the work.
People who want to be pilots love flying. Nonetheless they're not allowed to fly more than a number of hours, because passion, motivation and whatever you want won't prevent you from messing up when you're tired.
Amphetamines were invented for the military and particularly the special ops, mind you. As you know they come with their problems, too.
So please stop bullshitting yourself. As much as I like and respect Elon Musk, when he says this he's full of shit, plain and simple. Asking mechanics to work long hours building cars is terrible management. No wonder he finds defaults on each and every car.
> People who want to be pilots love flying. Nonetheless they're not allowed to fly more than a number of hours, because passion, motivation and whatever you want won't prevent you from messing up when you're tired.
Correct me if I'm wrong but quick googling shows that pilots are restricted to 100 hours of flight time per month by the FAA. That's 25 hours per week. Perhaps flight time is not exactly comparable to building cars time?
> So please stop bullshitting yourself.
I don't appreciate that.
I have friends who can eat twice the calories each meal that I have and don't gain a pound. Some of them sleep 5 hours per night and they're perfectly rested. Some of my friends spend 60 hours a week at work and still always feel behind.
Turns out that not everyone is built the same. I can't have a slice of pizza every day. I need at least 8.5 hours of sleep per night to function. I can accomplish as much work in 30 hours as some of my peers take 60 hours to do.
I can't sustain long work hours unless I'm working for myself, but not everyone is built the same.
> Perhaps flight time is not exactly comparable to building cars time?
It's not comparable in the consequences of you messing up because you're tired (150 deaths vs a misaligned rubber joint that leaks). However the underlying principle remains; when people work too much, they get tired and they makes many more errors. So it Musk wants absolutely perfect cars, he must gives more time off to the workers. Basic common sense supported by experience and scientific studies.
> > So please stop bullshitting yourself.
I don't appreciate that.
Sorry for the formulation, it wasn't targeting you, but this quite US-specific mix of protestant and macho ethos of hard work pushed to the absurd. Many, many people are dead sure _they_ can work so much more than the next guy and stay efficient.
> I have friends who can eat twice the calories each meal that I have and don't gain a pound. Some of them sleep 5 hours per night and they're perfectly rested. Some of my friends spend 60 hours a week at work and still always feel behind.
Yes, and some people can drink a bottle of wine everyday and never get cirrhosis, etc. Of course we're all different, and there probably are people that can work 60 (or maybe 80) hours a week and don't be tired and inefficient.
However you can't count on that, thus it's not reasonable to build a business model betting that you'll only get absolutely exceptional people with nearly super-human abilities in your team. Particularly when the number of employees is in the thousands (from the article Tesla currently has 2800 employees).
You may be right. Maybe working 50+ hours a week is always a net negative. Maybe a sane, family-friendly work environment will, in fact, maximize both the happiness and well-being of individual contributors and the productivity of the organization as a whole.
But you know what? Nobody told the kids in the garage down the street. You know... the ones who are working 60+ hours a week, and who are about to kick your company's ass, because there's no place on Earth they'd rather be than in that garage.
> the ones who are working 60+ hours a week, and who are about to kick your company's ass, because there's no place on Earth they'd rather be than in that garage.
Because they're 20 years old, and they'll do that only for a limited time anyway because even the energy from youth won't protect them from burnout. This is nice, heart-warming story we like to believe, but this is anecdote. In general, people work efficiently about 40 hours a week for long periods (months or years).
By the way, old asses like me have had their fair share of being in the office from 9AM to 22PM and you know what? While you're congratulating with your co-workers on what a bunch of hard-working supermen you are, you aren't actually getting anything done. It's incredibly hard to get things done 7 to 8 hours a day, it demands incredible energy and commitment; I don't pretend being even capable of this more than once or twice a week. Yes, I think that programming efficiently 40 hours a week is already nearly super-human, unless you're incredibly passionate and it's incredibly rewarding.
I don't think this has been established. But regardless, wazoox is saying that even eight hours a day (of real, focused work that doesn't involve checking Hacker News or Facebook all the time) is too much for most people over a long period of time.
It's all anecdotal evidence - I guess you could pull off a bit more if your job is your life. I've never met anyone who meets this criterion, but maybe someone else has.
I would be willing to work ~50/60 hours a week if the company accommodated me by helping me with my other goals, such as maid & laundry service, the kind of physical training I would like that I could do during work hours, a cook who would cook my weight loss diet to my specifications and somebody who would buy things on a list for me from target or wherever. That saves me more than the 10/20 hours extra they ask from me. Big clincher is to my specifications, which a lot of places cannot/wont do.
I think his "special forces" analogy is quite good.
Sure, most people won't join the military.
Sure, out of those that do, most won't be joining the special forces.
Sure, those that do join the special forces know it's "above and beyond", an added level of stress and quite difficult to do for 40+ years, but they do it anyways. Why? Probably because they're compelled by the greater mission and they're willing to do it in spite of the tradeoffs. Oh, and they're the best of the best, so they're probably okay with trading some rest for the work they're putting in.
Yes, most people won't hold up under those conditions, but special forces recruiters aren't looking for "most people". I suspect Musk isn't either.
Also, while you may think 40 hour work weeks are the optimal time, you'll have to admit it's a completely arbitrary number.
Elon himself, first and foremost, is proving your assertion wrong by easily working more, while simultaneously running 2 (I would suggest) of the most important emerging companies around. Sure, other aspects of his life may suffer, but he's willing to make that tradeoff.
Don't try to project your personal limitations onto someone else or create a population generality from a personal anecdote.
> Elon himself, first and foremost, is proving your assertion wrong by easily working more, while simultaneously running 2 (I would suggest) of the most important emerging companies around.
See my other comments. As a CEO, spending an afternoon chit-chatting with journalists, then having a filmed interview with Kevin Rose, then more chit-chatting qualifies as several hours of work. It's not remotely as strenuous as carefully aligning car doors for the same duration, though. Or writing down the specification of an important program without any interruption for facebook or HN.
It's much, much easier to work 60 to 100 hours a week as a CEO (because your work includes things like golfing with customers or dining with investors).
> Don't try to project your personal limitations onto someone else or create a population generality from a personal anecdote.
I don't deny Musk the ability to sleep 3 hours each night and work like a slave 16 hours a day, I really have no idea. However when as the CEO of a ~3000 people company he says he's expecting everyone to work 50-60 hours week, particularly auto workers, I pretend he's making a huge, grave management mistake.
Actually fatigue means that people doing repetitive work are extremely prone to error and worse, wounding themselves past a number of hours (depending upon the job). There's a reason there are laws forbidding truck drivers and plane pilots piling in hours.
Bullshit. When you're piling long hours, you make many mistakes, and that's totally independent from your passion, interest of whatever. This is just being tired.
BTW in 1998 I've worked 100+ hours/week for a few months; it ended in the hospital. So I think I've seen that from the inside, too.
As a high level knowledge worker (CEO or CTO), I may "work" for long hours getting informed on the latest trends reading HN. I can be in the office, or in the shower, ir running in the woods thinking about my next product. Heck, I can even be working, golfing with an important customer. By this metric of course I work 120 hours a week (though I spend at most 40 hours a week in the office).
However when you're typing in code, or carefully assembling a car engine, if you work too much you'll simply make more errors. This has been verified many times. It's absolutely not debatable. If you want to believe it's not this way, you're deluding yourself, and that's not good, don't do that.
BTW in 1998 I've worked 100+ hours/week for a few months; it ended in the hospital.
Hell of a difference between spending 50 hours a week on the job and spending 100. Everything you've said in this thread is undeniably true at 100 hours/week. Almost nothing you've said in this thread is generally true at 50.
Having been through several cycles of burnout over the years I tend to agree with you. These days I take nearly as much time to play as work, and my work is better for it.
That said, I wonder how much the type of work has an impact on diminishing productivity over a duration. Also wonder if EM takes this into account in other ways, like vacation time, etc.
Well at least he's upfront about it. Better than an org that says you should work 40 hr weeks then presses deadlines so hard you have no choice than to go over.
That's a good point. It sucks to work overtime constantly when you had other plans, commitments, etc, especially when the bosses are ungrateful.
On the other hand, when working on something that you know upfront is going to be an enormous challenge, and you really love what you're doing, the hours don't seem to matter. The problem for me becomes more of a physical thing. I can work a 70+ hour week or two, but then it takes a week to get back to the same level of output.
That is looking at it from the perspective of the individual. But the company can choose to not care about its individuals and just try to get the most out of them until they burn out. While not optimal this is pretty common in some startups in my experience.
And we recently saw statistics here on HN proving that working more than 40 hours/week for long durations is counter-productive. Alas, I'm sorry to see Elon Musk falling for this "tough men work hard" nonsense.