MarkL loves 4 a.m. workers

“The candle that burns twice as bright burns half as long.” – Tyrell, BladeRunner

Overwork only means incompetence, slave labor or a lack of social skills. Workaholics can become burnt-out stressed obsessives, and more is not always better. That geeks use such as a loyality badge, only proves all above points.

As hotbutton issues in the workplace go, this one has always been among the hottest. I have worked my share of 90-hour weeks, and my share of 40-hour weeks. I’ve seen people waste half of a 40-hour week, and I’ve seen people put in 80 or more productive hours in a 90-hour week. Sweeping generalizations like those in many of the comments here are not helpful, but in my experience, Mark’s comments point to trouble. If being at work at 3:00 AM has become a badge of honor, the corporate culture in his part of Google could very well be unsustainable.

Proud of your work? Great. Love what you’re doing? Great. Equating any of that with being at work at 3:00 AM? Misguided, in my opinion. Even really, really smart young motivated energetic 99th percentile people make costly mistakes at the end of an 18-hour day. And the phrase “wanted to nail their deadlines and then take a few days off…” does indeed lead to the question of management brought up in earlier comments — who planned the project that lead to a large number of smart highly-motivated people working these hours? Sure it’s a rush to work on a great project with a great team under tight deadlines. But it doesn’t take many months of “finals week” schedules to turn motivation into frustration and burn-out.

Love what you do, AND take care of yourself and your team. And to all those teams I’ve kept up until 3AM — oh, give me a break. You loved it.

If you’re working until 3am to make sure you nail your deadlines then you obviously need help in the project management department. I used to think working extremely long hours to meet or beat a deadline was an accomplishment. Now I look at it as a failure on my planning abilities. I guess the older I get the more I appreciate time away from work with my family. Working 12+ hours a day is certainly not “cool”. I say Mark needs some perspective…get a life.

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I don’t see what the big deal is about the comments. I regularly work 12-14 hour days when I’m in an environment that I’m passionate about (currently working towards creating a better work environment at my new job).

There’s little that I have less tolerance for than someone who’s just showing up to collect a paycheck and isn’t excited about the work their doing. There’s a lot of interesting work to be done out there on the web these days, and if you’re not excited about it, well, go do something you enjoy. The world is rich with opportunity (at least in richer Western countries), and if I didn’t love working on the web, you can sure as shit be sure that I’d be doing whatever it was that I was passionate about.

To say that my long hours on the job is somehow due to a shortcoming with myself is an insult.

I think the latest I’ve stayed in the 6 months I’ve been at MS was midnight or 1AM. I’ve probably done that a dozen times or so. Hard to keep track.

I remember the first time was when I was trying to trackdown a problem with our new installer technology back in the summer. I was pouring over registry diffs and walking dependencies for hours because I knew there was something to figure out and I didn’t want to go home without solving it.

Another time I stayed very late doing a “free time” project which was trying to figure out a way to implement functionality that the shell team told use was impossible (just like Outlook told us with our Outlook integration). I’m a test dev but this was functionality that everyone wanted but no one had the time to figure out how to do – so I put my mind to getting it done and so I did – and it involved a couple late nights.

A couple weeks ago I stayed late with a dev from our team tracking down a problem I’d found and making sure we had the right fix.

One thing I love about my team is that people have a lot of freedom in *how* they do their work. One person on my team gets his best work done at home. He comes to work like the rest of us for meetings and does most of his bug fixing there. But when there’s a major new feature to implement, he’ll disappear for a day or two then come back with the whole thing done on his laptop.

Personally, I do my best development work in a dark, quiet office with no distractions. But that’s just me.

I can’t speak for all teams at Microsoft, or the team that Mark previously worked on. But don’t dare tell me that my team lacks passion about our work.

I was thinking. If all those hard working people at Google were using Visual Studio and building for the .NET platform they could probably get more done in a lot less time.

Amen, Robert and Alfred!!! Alfred, I especially appreciated your comments here:

> I’ve been in the computer business for over 30 years
> and have concluded that there are only three reasons
> to work more than 40 hours a week on a regular basis.
> One – you are incompetent. Two – your management is
> incompetent. Three – you have no ability to socialize
> with others. I.e. No life.

I think the key here is also “on a regular basis.” I have proudly put in some >40 hour weeks with several companies and don’t regret that overtime a bit. But that intensified schedule was the *exception* rather than the rule.

Sadly, the “I work more hours than you do!” seems to still remain a (shockingly stupid) badge of honor for many geeks, especially American geeks. My European friends — with lower obesity rates, longer lifespans, and so on in the aggregate — think this syndrome is nuts, and rightly so.

In fact, in a recent Microsoft interview, one of the managers bragged about how he had not eaten lunch away from his desk more than two days in the last year due to the “stresses” and “fast pace” of his environment.

Frankly, I pity those who lack the communications skills or life passion to articulate their commitment to their careers in ways that don’t involve “quantity.”

More does not equal better. It’s great, some would say even essential to feel passionate about one’s work, but as the modified saying goes, how many folks would really like on their epitaph:

“He coded some really cool geek things”

rather than…

“He spent a lot of quality time with friends, family, and loved ones.”

At least I know where I stand.

I’ve worked at MS and seen how it works. MarkL is very, very on target with all of his comments. It is about passion (not about hours) and it lacking in many places in MS. If you’ve joined recently, then you may not see the difference form how it used to be. Even some people who have been there a while don’t seem to notice it much or aren’t quite sure what change (akin to raising the temperature slowly to boil a frog).

Also, I’ve seen people aren’t that passionate about their at MS. The ind of passion where you get lost in your work and lose track of time. There is a traffic jam leaving ms at about 5PM-6PM. It is pretty rare when people work hard there, and when I haven’t seen it, much of it was due to obscene management pressure to make up for horrible schedule/feature management. It was truly pathetic to hear “we value your work/life balance” in on breath and then “we need to get more done than before” in the next breath.

People don’t feel as passionate in such an environment and even worse as Mark also points out, they aren’t given much of the reward for their hard efforts.

Anyway, there are many problems at MS beyond those pointed out by Mark here:
http://minimsft.blogspot.com/2005/12/comment-report-markl-nee-of-microsoft.html#c113546497291031756
But from my experience, people who are able to enact change aren’t willing to do so. It was very discouraging and depressing. It is why I left MS after many years.

For further reading about the topics mentioned in MarkL’s comment see
http://adamjh.blogspot.com/2005/12/work-hard-play-hard-at-google.html
and
http://www.glaak.com/Default.aspx?b=c8067f94-00c9-4f51-a5bc-0c712de22cd8

It isn’t just Mark noticing this, but he is the most visible and the one being picked on for standing up to point out bad issues.

>I was thinking. If all those hard working people at Google were using Visual
>Studio and building for the .NET platform they could probably get more done
>in a lot less time.

What? Visual Studio and .NET automatically makes you more productive? Give me a break, there are plenty of development tools and environments out there that are just as (or more) productive than Visual Studio.

Google and Yahoo! are doing just fine with *nix boxes and open source web servers, application servers, languages etc. If they thought that VS would make them that much more productive, then they’d use them. But they don’t so they don’t use them.

MarkL was working on his 20% time till 3 am

It’s said that Google is letting someone who doesn’t understand the basics of managing developers. My comments here.

Having worked at MSFT for 12 years and now having worked with Googlers for the last few years, I find striking parallels. In the spirit of the New Year’s, I have suggested some New Year’s Resolutions that apply some of the lessons I learned along the way — http://marketvelocity.blogspot.com/2005/12/new-years-resolutions-for-googlers.html

Two of them i’ve excerpted below that are particularly relevant…

4. Work late only if that’s your “in the zone” time. I had an earlier post sharing my Uncle Bill’s words of wisdom upon his retirement as a Consumer Packages Good exec. #6 on his list was “It is not important that you come in early and work late. The important thing is WHY?” Mark Lucovsky is an ex-Microsoftie now at Google that seems to think that working at 3 or 4am is some measure of success/passion. I disagree. Whether you are a developer, athlete or business person, there are times when you are “in the zone”. When you look back at the past year, there are usually 3-5 things you did exceptionally well when you were “in the zone” and those were the things that really made a difference. For me, those usually take place between 5 and 8am. I’m sure 3 or 4am is that time for others but I doubt that’s the case for most people. Don’t get caught up in the machismo of showing how late you can work. It’s results at whatever time that matter.
5. Learn to throw a change-up and knuckleball. In baseball, many young pitchers get into the major leagues with a killer fastball. Likewise, younger tech workers often try a similar approach where they just “throw” with as much energy as possible. Unfortunately, like in baseball, they will usually flame-out or burnout. Learning some finesse is the key to a long, successful career in baseball or tech. I saw lots of carnage at Microsoft where some of these former “fastballers” ran out of gas and became virtually worthless to their team and to society.

Hi Robert, I work at a petrochemical company in South Africa. When one of the long-time executives of the company retired, he was asked which one thing he would do different, if he could have his career at the company over. He answered that he wouldn’t work such long hours, and wouldn’t expect his fellow employees to do that either.

Two other comments: I remember coming across this article in Fortune magazine: Get a life. Also, check out the November 2005 article in National Geographic on longevity, and how one of the common things among different groups of people living to over 100 years old, are that they put family first!

Firstly those hours are very anti-XP. Overtime breeds poor code which breeds rework. I’d also question their project and resource managment…

Scoble, seeing the company taken over by non-engineering marketeers and sales drones was one key reason I left Microsoft after five years.

Unfortunately you’ve done little to improve that impression. The catty sniping you did at Mark Lucovsky on mini-msft’s blog showed you unwilling to address the issues raised, and evade them with an ad-hominem attack.

My goodness–WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO MICROSOFT??

When I started I came on the tail-end of a passionate engineering culture; albeit, one with too little discipline–but nonetheless, turning out some excellent ideas and products that had people so excited they were willing to line up for a midnight sale of Windows 95!

Where is that now?

Scoble have you noticed that there seems in *inverse* relationship between your, and others’, frenetically rabid cheerleading and the level of excitement in that oh-so-important demographic that successful companies refer to as “customers”?

From a strategic engineering standpoint, I was increasingly disgusted with the hobbling of every other product to promulgate the “Protect Windows At Any Cost” strategy. Can you imagine if .NET were sold on every platform, for a reasonable price?

Oh I have an even better idea–how about the executives engaged Sun and Java constructively, instead of playing the “Whose Gonads are Greater” game? Perhaps the immense effort of developing .NET could have worked in synergy with the overall Java concept? I’m sure McNealy could have gotten over his pissiness had BillSteve pitched it rationally and as partners, not bickering feudal lords.

As it turned out, that particular feud cost the company dearly in both lost effort, a payout to Sun, and threw gasoline on the DOJ case by incenting Sun to participate with vitriol.

Now Microsoft is beefing up the dev- and architect-evangelist teams, populated at the top with mostly non-technical flacks. Those who have technical talent–friends of mine who still work at Microsoft–are kept away from the frontlines of technology so much that their useful shelf-life is about two years.

After that, they have ZERO credibility in front of real software developers.

How many years have you been away from the frontline?

Just a small correction Scoble – MarkL was never an exceutive at Microsoft. It’s false to claim so. He was a leader with high profile, but that’s not the same thing.

Despite Scoble’s sniping of MarkL over at MiniMSFT, and despite the cries of defenders here, Microsoft is still the “coming soon” company while Google is the “now” company.

Anyone care to address why that is? Scoble? Does filming super-exciting PR videos do anything to address the issue?

Preston: I think you mean the “now (beta)” company.