The Limit Does Not Exist! - Developer Productivity At Startups

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hey folks I'm just going through comments on YouTube and wanted to get to one from the improved or I don't know if I got all the O's but I think that's uh approximately it so they said currently an engineer in the military but my contract is finishing up and looking to hop into a startup my perception is 80 plus hour weeks of work but is that reality it sure seems like it on X or Twitter I have no issue with working that much assuming the j/m mission is fun and interesting but are these people actually doing productive work for that long so interesting question um I'll share some of my perspective and opinion on this also found another comment that uh from someone that said not on the same video I don't think but I just wanted to share it because it's awesome um something

along the lines of this was driil and then I'm a profoundly shitty person and they're glad that they don't work for me well thank you for your comment um if you have questions that You' like answer leave them in the comments below or send a message to Dev leader that's my main YouTube channel and my social media handle um if you submit your questions uh on other social media platforms through messages I'll keep you Anonymous Happ to do that if you leave them in the comments they're all public so I'm not keeping you Anonymous and if you want to leave me super shitty mean comments too usually I post them on Twitter for people to go oh man like look at that um so you can check out the mean crappy comments on my Twitter um because they go right to there okay um because

I'm profoundly shitty um okay so for those of you that don't know I work at Microsoft right now for the past roughly five years it be five years in August and uh before that though I worked at a startup then I started at that startup when it was about seven people and grew to around 250 by the time I left so got to kind of do the whole startup scaling fun times thing so um I will always try to remind people in my videos that like everything I talk about is from my experience right I'm not telling you this is how it is everywhere all the time I can't do that it's impossible and it would be wrong um so all that I can do is share my experience and then where possible try to call out bias and explain like here's here's why I

see things some way maybe it could be different so um to this person's question about 80 plus hour weeks of work that's how I worked when I was at a startup what I will add that's important to note is that no one made me work like that at the startup the founder and the CEO so two different people um so the CTO was the founder and the CEO was the CEO the co-founder or I guess you call them co-founder is wasn't really the founder so there's two people that own the company basically and uh neither of them at any point was like Hey you better work longer what they did that I thought worked really well and I don't think that it's common and I want to make that clear I don't think it's common but what they did really well was they had a

really solid Mission because we were building digital forensic software we were helping law enforcement invest investigators examiners solve crimes we were often like one of the most common use cases which is very unfortunate uh but very sort of rewarding to be part of is for um is for what's called CES Sam uh so I don't even I don't want to say it particularly on on YouTube I don't know if like I'll get flagged or whatever but it's basically for uh children so we were helping save children in some of the darkest types of crime situations you could imagine so um very powerful mission to be part of that and so they had that and then what they did and I thought was the other part that worked really well was that they offered a lot of autonomy so it was like we have this really

important mission in front of us here's the direction we want to move in as we as we work on that mission and we trust you so go ahead and I when I've told like spoken about my experience when I was an intern had six internships I had two full years of work experience as an intern I want to say it was probably a probably a shitty intern um not because I like produce bad code um and I shouldn't say it was that like I wasn't bad um I I didn't have the work ethic and the interest that I have today so I would I would get in on time leave on time if I could maybe a little early like I had no interest in being there in any of my internships even if they were like kind of cool it was like I'm a

kid I want to play video games I want to be with my friends um I had no desire to be better at what I was doing while there and just wasn't interesting and it flipped completely once I had graduated and worked at this startup as my first full-time job I went from being like time to try to rush home and play video games to like I'm going to keep working I'm going to go to the gym from work and when I'm done at the gym I'm going to keep working and no one made me do it so I got very well yeah I got lucky some people would say that doesn't sound lucky it sounds like you're being being forced to work too much no like I loved what I was doing I loved it no one made me do that and I still did

it now they also compensated me not per hour or else I would have retired uh cuz I worked a lot of hours um so they they compensated me well I felt like I was treated very fairly like I said I had a lot of autonomy and a powerful Mission so I just kept working so to this person's question like you know are you actually doing productive work for that long like there's there's a couple different angles to this right because there's a follow-up question or comment from someone uh Arbiter of Life responded and said honestly I don't past 50 hours much productivity is actually happening um I understand the the idea here right because I could say to give you a different perspective I have abs over the past you know let's let's kind of let's pick on Microsoft for a second right like I

can absolutely imagine working 80 hours in my current environment at Microsoft and being like how much productivity is happening in those 80 hours the efficiency would be reduced it's not to say that I couldn't find a way to work an 80-hour week at Microsoft and and be efficient I'm just saying like based on how my current work weeks are there's enough stuff that is like dependent on other people different time zones there's so many moving parts that have like all these dependencies that the nature of things kind of slows down and when you're doing more things in parallel to compensate for it there's a lot of context switching you get inefficiencies when I was at this startup there was so much to do all of the time either putting out fires trying to rapidly prototype the next thing that we could go try there was

so much to do that like I can say with confidence there was a lot of productivity like working out uh weeks like that um now I understand what the person is saying though right like if you're going to be working so much where's the balance now like I said I feel like I got lucky because I really really liked what I was doing and I realized that's not the normal thing so let's talk about the bias here right that's not the normal thing I um let's let's pick a different example right so I'm building brand ghost on the side um which is my social media content scheduling platform um that's being done like after hours like when I have time to do it and even with that so that's not 80 hour weeks even with that I have had periods of time and I rely

on this for all of my content creation I've I've absolutely had points in time over the past year where I'm like burnt out from it or like I'm trying to work on stuff and I'm like man I think I'm just refactoring code and moving stuff around and like that's not a good use of time like the productivity is not there and like that's come up normally so I think like it's always possible to have these situations where we say you know based on an amount of time you pick 80 hours 60 hours 40 hours almost regardless of the time you're putting into it you can have these periods where it's not like an effective use of time in any of these situations but I personally my experience led to in this startup environment for me it was always like there's a lot of stuff that

can lead to productivity I would say if there were if we didn't have all those ingredients that I talked about which is like you know solid Mission uh treated like in terms of compensation treated fairly um and then atomy like those are sort of the ingredients for me if one of those ingredients was missing and I should I'll tack on something else in a moment but if one of those was missing it probably wouldn't have been as sustainable it eventually wasn't because I did this for years and then had problems with like social anxiety because I was just working so it was like sustainable from the perspective of like I'm not sick of work but I traded everything else in my life which is not okay that's going to lead to this other part that I wanted to mention was like those are the ingredients

for making me like be productive at work in this startup environment but another sort of ingredient that needed to be to be PR I don't know a good way to say this the ingredient analogy is not working but basically because I didn't have other responsibilities at that point in my life I was able to do that I got to work and I wanted to go to the gym I had no like I paid off my student loans quickly I was able to get uh a car that wasn't in shambles from high school and had a place to live so bought my own place and I had had my mortgage payment I didn't have a girlfriend and any any girlfriends I had were like not it wasn't like a sustainable thing or whatever probably because I was working a lot um but like you know wasn't

in a long-term relationship didn't have a wife didn't have kids right so I didn't have responsibilities outside of work and going to the gym so I for me the gym was one thing I would never trade right I made sure every day I went to the gym not saying that's necessarily good you need rest days and stuff but I just like going to the gym that was one thing without compromise it was like you want me to like if someone was like we need you to work late I would be like I don't care I'm going to work anyway but I got to go to the gym you schedule whatever you want with me anytime as long as I can go to the gym I don't care that was my my responsibility now I had to change that later and I ended up getting a

dog who's lla she's I think she's 10 years old now but I got my dog lla so if we do the math on that 5 years at Microsoft so eight years at Magnet so like three three-ish years in three to four years into to magnet is when I got yla because I was like holy crap I've just like literally I've only been working for these three to four years I haven't done anything else and I started to notice the social anxiety and stuff right so I got a dog because that was my strategy for like you need a responsibility that pulls you out of work and it was the best decision I ever made right lla has I said this before and I'll say it again lla has absolutely saved my life she was in one of the code commute videos uh few weeks ago

now um she like came in I was filming in here and she like came in and then she like lied down in the corner was being kind of funny um but the productivity part was never an issue for me so if some of those ingredients were different I could see that being the case if I had responsibilities outside of work right getting lla meant that I had to do other like I had to go like leave at lunch to go see her to make sure I was home after work to go see her so it pulled me away from work but if I had like children or if I had a wife and I'm like look like those are higher priorities in my life then I'm you know in terms of if I was forced to go work right so now it's like no no

no like you need to be here and I'm like yeah but I got a wife and kids then then I would feel like I'm now forced to work now all of a sudden my productivity not going to be the same if I wasn't given autonomy I've learned this about myself if you remove the autonomy from me I will burn out instantly because the way I generally am working is like I am like Full Tilt I am maxed out on everything I can possibly be doing and it's because there's a lot of things that I do that I enjoy but as soon as you take away the autonomy because I'm already like almost redlining you take away autonomy and I'm instantly like I don't like this and I am don't want to do it at all I've learned that about myself so that's an ingredient I

need if I'm feeling like I'm not being compensated and someone's like yeah but you got to work more no maybe earlier in my career that would have been different cuz I'm like okay I guess this is how it is but at this point in my career if someone was like by the way you have to just start working more and we're not compensating you more I'd be like that's nice like I guess I'm applying to other jobs so I think what I'm getting at with the productivity part and the The Hours worked is like I think the productivity would plummet relative to hours worked if some of those pieces were missing and I think that that's going to be that is actually common for most people the reason I wanted to walk through my experience is because I feel like I had stars align for

my job and that's why I had that experience so I share it because I want to say like it is possible that you can have that I will also say that was one of the places where you know people are like the cheesy like oh we're a family I'm like it felt like a family too like it was like I said it felt like the stars aligned at that place so when most people go through this and for someone to say yeah but probably after 50 hours a week there's not a lot of prod or the productivity drops probably for most people right I would say after your 40 hours like you're 9 to5 I would say probably your productivity drops somewhere after that because if that's your normal working habit maybe for this person that was saying that they're from the engineer in the

military I don't know maybe based on their experience maybe they're already kind of acclimated to working more so I think that's another part that's individual right depending on who you are how you've been operating if you've acclimated to just doing more work then maybe yeah you can be productive more right like if you're just used to doing it then probably but for say the Aver if the average person's working their like you know 38 and 1 half to 40 hour work week and then suddenly they're tossed into something that's like 60 hours 80 hours yeah probably not unless they're like in love with it so that's my perspective on it um if it wasn't obvious I will just say it again to make it very clear that like your mileage can and will vary right I shared with you my experience I tried to give

you some other perspective but I think those are the things I would consider right you have to understand for yourself what's going to be motivating you to work because when some of those pieces are missing and then you need to work more it's probably going to feel like absolute trash so um everyone's GNA have a different experience so hope that helps if you would like to be like the other person that left me mean comments and stuff and I'm terrible human being you don't want to work for me or with me that's cool too um but again if you have questions that you want to answered I would be happy to try and help I'm just trying to be helpful so leave them in the comments below or send a message to Dev leader and I'll see you next time take care