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- John Carmack on the importance hard work: “For decades, I worked 60 hours a week”
John Carmack on the importance hard work: “For decades, I worked 60 hours a week”
“I was never one of the programmers who would do all-nighters or work for 20 hours straight,” programming legend John Carmack begins when asked about his work routine. “My brain generally starts turning to mush after 12 hours or so. But hard work is really important, and for decades I would work 60 hours a week. I would work 10 hours a day, 6 days a week.”
He continues:
“I had a little thing in the back of my head where I was almost jealous of some of the programmers who would do these marathon sessions. Like Dave Taylor, one of the guys we had at id Software, would be one of those people who would fall asleep under his desk sometimes and all the classic hacker tropes about these things. Part of me was always a little bothered that wasn’t me. I wouldn’t program 20 hours straight because I’m falling apart and not being very effective after 12 hours . . . There are people who can work on 4 hours of sleep and continue to do good work, but there’s a lot of people who just fall apart. I always try to get 8 hours of sleep . . . you can work 100 hours a week and still get 8 hours of sleep if you prioritize things correctly. But I do believe in working hard.”
John disagrees with the backlash against hard work and voices support for game developer’s comment that “40 hours a week is kind of a part-time job.”
“If you’re doing what you think is important work that you’re passionate about, working more gets more done. It’s really not possible to argue with that if you’ve been around the people who work with that level of intensity.”
He believes people who argue that you’re less productive if you work more than 40 hours a week are misinterpreting things:
“Your marginal productivity for an hour after eight hours is less than one of your peak hours, but you’re not literally getting less done. There’s a point where you start breaking things and literally going backwards, but it’s not 8-12 hours.”
John illustrates this point with a fictional example:
“Imagine there’s an asteroid that’s going to crash into Earth and destroy all human life. Do you want Elon Musk and the people working at SpaceX building the interceptor that’s going to deflect the asteroid clocking out at 5pm because they’re going to do worse work if they work another couple hours? It seems absurd . . . It’s the truth: working longer gets more done.”