Startup working hours

Jason Calacanis wrote a post about saving money as a startup which had the great and the good squawking.

Having just spent the weekend with a development team and a business team I'd like to offer this contribution on his point #11 (now edited):

1. Business and development are different skills and tasks. Guys on the business side can do around 4 tasks at the one time (UAT, reading blogs, listening to the football and updating a paper) while a developer must focus.

2. The quality of work from different people suffers over time to the point where a front end developer may introduce more bugs than productive work i.e. beyond a certain point you are doing negative work.

3. The younger the business guy the more likely he is to do silly hours. The older he gets the more productive he gets. With appropriate focus & efficiency and under normal working situations, you should need to have to do such long hours. (There are obvious exceptions such as launch and pushing bigger projects out the door.)

Aside from this I agree with all of the advice apart from walking to Starbucks. Some of my most productive discussions involve walking to Neros (Starbucks doesn't sell real coffee, it sells coffee flavored milk).