> The Codex sprint was probably the hardest I've worked in nearly a decade. Most nights were up until 11 or midnight. Waking up to a newborn at 5:30 every morning. Heading to the office again at 7a. Working most weekends.
There's so much compression / time-dilation in the industry: large projects are pushed out and released in weeks; careers are made in months.
Worried about how sustainable this is for its people, given the risk of burnout.
If anyone tried to demand that I work that way, I’d say absolutely not.
But when I sink my teeth into something interesting and important (to me) for a few weeks’ or months’ nonstop sprint, I’d say no to anyone trying to rein me in, too!
Speaking only for myself, I can recognize those kinds of projects as they first start to make my mind twitch. I know ahead of time that I’ll have no gas left the tank by the end, and I plan accordingly.
Luckily I’ve found a community who relate to the world and each other that way too. Often those projects aren’t materially rewarding, but the few that are (combined with very modest material needs) sustain the others.
The latter. I mean, I feel like a disproportionate number of folks who hang around here have that kind of disposition.
That just turns out to be the kind of person who likes to be around me, and I around them. It’s something I wish I had been more deliberate about cultivating earlier in my life, but not the sort of thing I regret.
In my case that’s a lot of artists/writers/hackers, a fair number of clergy, and people working in service to others. People quietly doing cool stuff in boring or difficult places… people whose all-out sprints result in ambiguity or failure at least as often as they do success. Very few rich people, very few who seek recognition.
The flip side is that neither I nor my social circles are all that good at consistency—but we all kind of expect and tolerate that about each other. And there’s lots of “normal” stuff I’m not part of, which I probably could have been if I had tried. I don’t know what that means to the business-minded people around here, but I imagine it includes things like corporate and nonprofit boards, attending sports events in stadia, whatever golf people do, retail politics, Society Clubs For Respectable People, “Summering,” owning rich people stuff like a house or a car—which is fine with me!
I don't need recovery time afterward (apart from sleep), but when I'm surrounded by people who do I want some equivalent compensation, not because I feel I need it, but because I feel they are slackers (not saying they are objectively slackers, just saying that's how it feels to me). many compromises need to be made when sprinting all out, and in the aftermath what is restorative to me is cleaning up the technical debt while it's fresh in my mind and I can't understand that other people don't want to do the same thing.
This guy who is already independently wealthy chose working 16-17h 7 days a week instead of raising his newborn child and thanks his partner for “childcare duties”. Pretty much tells you everything you need to know.
Yeah as someone who has a young child this entire post made me feel like I was taking crazy pills. Working this much with a newborn is toxic behavior and if a company demands it then it is toxic culture. And writing about it as anything but that feels like some combination of Stockholm syndrome, being a workaholic, and marketing spin.
Being passionate about something and giving yourself to a project can be amazing, but you need to have the bandwidth to do it without the people you care about suffering because of that choice.
>>Working this much with a newborn is toxic behavior and if a company demands it then it is toxic culture. And writing about it as anything but that feels like some combination of Stockholm syndrome, being a workaholic, and marketing spin.
It's not sustainable, at all, but if it's happening just a couple times throughout your career, it's doable; I know people who went through that process, at that company, and came out of it energized.
I couldn't imagine asking my partner to pick up that kind of childcare slack. Props to OP's wife for doing so, and I'm glad she got the callout at the end, but god damn.
I think Altman said in Lex F. podcast that he works 8 hours, 4 first one being the most productive ones and he doesn't believe CEO claiming they work 16 hours a day. Weird contrast to what described in the article. This confirms my theory that there are two types of people in startups: founders and everybody else, the former are there to potentially make a lot of money, and the later are there to learn and leave.
It's worst than that. Lots of power struggles and god-like egos. Altman called one of the employees "Einstein" on Twitter, some think they were chosen to transcend humanity, others believe they're at war with China, some want to save the world, others see it burn, and some just want their names up there with Gates and Jobs.
This is what ex-employees said in Empire of AI, and it's the reason Amodei and Kaplan left OpenAI to start Anthropic.
He references childcare and paternity leave in the post and he was a co-founder in a $3B acquisition. To me it seems it is a time-of-life/priorities decision not a straight up burnout decision.
Working a job like that would literally ruin my life. There's no way I could have time to be a good husband and father under those conditions, some things should not be sacrificed.
Many people are bad parents. Many are bad at their jobs. Many at bad at both. At least this guy is good at his job, and can provide very well for his family.
It is all relative. A workaholic seems pretty nice when compared to growing up with actual objectively bad parents, workaholics plus: addicts, perpetually drunk, gamblers, in jail, no shows for everything you put time into, competing with you when obtaining basic skills, abusing you for being a kid, etc.
There are plenty worse than that. The storied dramatic fiction parent missing out on a kid's life is much better than what a lot of children have.
Yet, all kids grow up, and the greatest factor determining their overall well-being through life is socioeconomic status, not how many hours a father was present.
Im very interested in that topic and haven’t made up my mind about what really counts in parenting.
You have sources for the claim about well-being (asking explicitly about mental well-being and not just material well-being) being more influenced by socioeconomic status and not so much by parental absence?
About the guy: I think if it’s just a one time thing it’s ok but the way he presents himself gives reason for doubt
A parent should provide their kids with opportunities to try new things. Sometimes this might require gently making a kid do something at least a few times until it's clear it's not something they are good at or interested in. Also deciding when to try something is important - kids might need to try it at different ages. And of course convincing and reassuring a kid might be necessary to try something they are afraid to do. Until the age of 12 or so, it's important to make it fun, at least initially.
It's debatable whether a parent always needs to "lead by example": for example, I've never played hockey, but I introduced my son to it, and he played for a while (until injuries made us reconsider and he stopped). For mental well-being, make sure to not display your worst emotions in front of your kids - they will definitely notice, and will probably carry it for the rest of their lives.
They were showered with assets for being a lucky individual in a capital driven society, time is interchangeable for wealth, as evidenced throughout history.
This guy is young. He can experience all that again, if it is that much of a failure, and he really wants to.
Sure, there are ethical issues here, but really, they can be offset by restitution, lets be honest.
My hot take is I don’t think burn out has much to do with raw hours spent working. I feel it has a lot more to do with sense of momentum and autonomy. You can work extremely hard 100 hour weeks six months in a row, in the right team and still feel highly energized at the end of it. But if it feels like wading through a swamp, you will burn out very quickly, even if it’s just 50 hours a week. I also find ownership has a lot to do with sense of burnout
And if the work you're doing feels meaningful and you're properly compensated. Ask people to work really hard to fill out their 360 reviews and they should rightly laugh at you.
At some level of raw hours, your health and personal relationships outside work both begin to wither, because there are only 24 hours in a day. That doesn’t always cause burnout, but it provides high contrast - what you are sacrificing.
Exactly this - if not at all about hours spent (at least that’s not a good metric; working less will benefit a burned out person; but the hours were not the root cause). The problem is lack of autonomy, lack of control over things you care about deeply. If those go out the window, the fire burns out quickly.
Imho when this happens it’s usually because a company becomes too big, and the people in control lack subject matter expertise, have lost contact with the people that drive the company, and instead are guided by KPIs and the rules they enforced grasping for that feeling of being in control.
2024 my wife and I did a startup together. We worked almost every hour we were awake, 16-18 hours a day, 7 days a week. We ate, we went for an hour's walk a day, the rest of the time I was programming. For 9 months. Never worked so hard in my life before. And, not a lick of burnout during that time, not a moment of it, where I've been burned out by 6 hour work days at other organizations. If you're energized by something, I think that protects you from burnout.
i hope thats not a hot take because it's 100% correct.
people conflate the terms "burnout" and "overwork" because they seem semantically similar, but they are very different.
you can fix overwork with a vacation. burnout is a deeper existential wound.
my worst bout of burnout actually came in a cushy job where i was consistently underworked but felt no autonomy or sense of purpose for why we were doing the things we were doing.
I don't really have an opinion on working that much, but working that much and having to go into the office to spend those long hours sounds like torture.
for the amount of money they are giving that is relatively easy, normal people are paid way less in harder jobs, for example, working in an Amazon Warehouse or doing door-to-door sales, etc.
Those that love the work they do don't burn out, because every moment working on their projects tends to be joyful. I personally hate working with people who hate the work they do, and I look forward to them being burned out
Sure, but this schedule is like, maybe 5 hours of sleep per night. Other than an extreme minority of people, there’s no way you can be operating on that for long and doing your best work. A good 8 hours per night will make most people a better engineer and a better person to be around.
"You don't really love what you do unless you're willing to do it 17 hours a day every day" is an interesting take.
You can love what you do but if you do more of it than is sustainable because of external pressures then you will burn out. Enjoying your work is not a vaccine against burnout. I'd actually argue that people who love what they do are more likely to have trouble finding that balance. The person who hates what they do usually can't be motivated to do more than the minimum required of them.
Weird how we went from like the 4 hour workweek and all those charts about how people historically famous in their field spent only a few hours a day on what they were most famous for, to "work 12+ hours a day or you're useless".
Also this is one of a few examples I've read lately of "oh look at all this hard work I did", ignoring that they had a newborn and someone else actually did all of the hard work.
I read gp’s formulation differently: “if you’re working 17 hours a day, you’d better stop soon unless you’re doing it for the love of doing it.” In that sense it seems like you and gp might agree that it’s bad for you and for your coworkers if you’re working like that because of external pressures.
I don’t delight in anybody’s suffering or burnout. But I do feel relief when somebody is suffering from the pace or intensity, and alleviates their suffering by striking a more sustainable balance for them.
I feel like even people energized by efforts like that pay the piper: after such a period I for one “lay fallow”—tending to extended family and community, doing phone-it-in “day job” stuff, being in nature—for almost as long as the creative binge itself lasted.
I would indeed agree with things as you've stated. I interpreted "the work they do" to mean "their craft" but if it was intended as "their specific working conditions" I can see how it'd read differently.
I think there are a lot of people that love their craft but are in specific working conditions that lead to burnout, and all I was saying is that I don't think it means they love their craft any less.
I am not saying that’s easy work but most motivated people do this. And if you’re conscious of this that probably means you viewed it more as a job than your calling.
> Worried about how sustainable this is for its people, given the risk of burnout.
Well given the amount of money OpenAI pays their engineers, this is what it comes with. It tells you that this is not a daycare or for coasters or for the faint of heart, especially at a startup at the epicenter of AI competition.
There is now a massive queue of lots of desperate 'software engineers' ready to kill for a job at OpenAI and will not tolerate the word "burnout" and might even work 24 hours to keep the job away from others.
For those who love what they do, the word "burnout" doesn't exist for them.
There's so much compression / time-dilation in the industry: large projects are pushed out and released in weeks; careers are made in months.
Worried about how sustainable this is for its people, given the risk of burnout.