Office Hours
Craig Turner, 18 December 2024
--

The Australian republished a WSJ article talking about a drug culture amongst
banks employees,
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/health/the-drugs-young-bankers-use-to-get-through-the-day-and-night/news-story/fada84cb79d9a0d9365ac565e55dc3fc

"Many on Wall Street see Adderall and Vyvanse as tools to plough through long
hours of tedious work amid high-pressure competition. In Australia the
equivalent to Adderall, Dexamphetamine, is known as a party drug."

This is a trope article. Every five years or so there is a prominent article
and ripple among chattering people about long hours being worked at either
banks or consulting firms.

I have had a career in finance for fifteen years, including stints on Broad
Street (adjacent to Wall Street) and London Wall. I have worked with
top-talent quants and developers.

When I read stories about people working sustained 80 or 90 hour weeks, I
struggle to believe the claimed hours.

With that said, I am inexperienced with drugs. I have only ever used alcohol
and caffeine. And - most of my time has been in privately owned trading firms
rather than banks. As far as I know none of these firms has had a drug
culture. Indeed - I expect there will be no overlap between top talent and
drug use.

Finance work needs to be done to a high standard, otherwise you end up
creating more work from the errors, or making mistakes that would get you
fired/send you broke. The use of drugs and high contact hours seem
incompatible with high quality work.

Some of the techniques used in the article look like madness. "One banker who
worked in Houston between 2017 and 2019 described his colleagues drinking
/Monsterbombs/ - an extra-strength 5-hour Energy shot dropped into a glass
filled with Monster Energy, chugged in one go. The caffeine payload was the
equivalent of nearly five cups of coffee at once."

That kind of caffeine consumption has a heavy come-down. Are they counting
time spend sleeping on the sofa towards the count of office hours?

Perhaps someone could spend many hours at the office, with most of it spent
staring blankly at the screen. That is misery, not work.

// 100 hours a week - this is what it looks like

The most intense week of my career was for a live-live datacentre migration I
ran earlier this year in Frankfurt. [1]

The migration had time pressure. Datacentre footprints are expensive - cabinet
rental, network connections to partners. I planned that we would make the move
within the calendar month of June. This would keep the window of duplicate
costs to a single billing month.

We have some scheduling delays, leading to us making poor use of the early
weeks of that month. The work of physically shifting the servers was pushed
back and pushed back to the final week of the month.

We decided to send three people to site for this shift.

On the Monday I woke at 4am to get a 6am flight to Germany. The exit flight
was scheduled for 1pm on Thursday. Between arriving at the site on Monday and
leaving for the airport on Thursday I had about ten hours of sleep in total.

The others had a similar experience.

Each of us in the team had a nearby hotel room, with an option on a catered
breakfast and fast-food for other meals.

A lot of my work had poor efficiency - for example - taking two hours to
troubleshoot a network connectivity matter that would have taken ten minutes
if I had been in healthy mind.

We got it done, then had a few light weeks to recover.

We had six months of distraction from detail errors we made during the
transition. The quality of the wiring layout is still sub-par, and this acts
as a kind of tax on future work. We are gradually improving it.

That is what the pace of a 100-hour-week looks like, except we did not
maintain it for even one week.

// 70 hours a week - still too much

The most committed colleague I have known kept a pattern of working for about
70 hours a week. At the time he had no family, lived within walking distance
of the office. He was teetotal, in good health, not overweight and younger
than 40. He had a collapse in the office after about 18 months at that pace.
After that he cut his hours and took more time for himself and was fine again.

In an earlier job, many were pushing 70-hours a week, I saw the aftermath of a
detail mistake that caused tens of millions in losses. Looking back, I see the
error as the inevitable consequence of the push-too-hard culture of that work
environment, and how many corners had been cut in defining the deployment. The
colleague scapegoat and our immediate managers suffered consequences for a
dynamic that was beyond their control.

// 50 hours a week - go hard or go home

My career focus is designing and implementing distributed platforms. This is
mostly programming work. It is informed by that nasty early experience.

The best periods of my career and my life have been assignemnts involving
creative work with familiar tools, full autonomy, control over my schedule,
low interruptions, and no significant housework. I gravitate to 50 hour weeks
in those conditions, and euphoria.

There is value to long hours when you engage in deep-focus work, because it
can take a long time to load the problem you are working on into your mind.
Once you have it loaded, you can get high momentum, and it often makes sense
to work for long as you have energy.

But if I do this for a few days in a row, my mind gets lethargic, and I am at
risk of doing damage to my codebase if I work in that state. Due to this, I
back off. This dynamic brings the week average back to about 50.

Outsiders to programming tend to talk about it as though it is a dusty, dry
topic. It is not. It is one of the most flexible and expressive mediums that
we have the opportunity to work with. When you have momentum with it, it is
exhilarating.


--
[1] Live-live means you need to keep the platform running continuously even
while you are shifting the servers from cabinets in one room to another room.
In fact, there was a window of about six hours each night where the platform
did not need to be running. But it did need to be running during the days,
even while the platform was running across two sites.