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 did not make the best use of our time early in the month and the work of physically shifting the servers was pushed back and pushed back to the final week of the month. The project team for that shift was three people. 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 need to take a break, and this 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.