> For one thing, it's highly convenient that the standard US work-week happens to be the exact "correct" amount of hours to work to maximize productivity.
You're right, it's probably actually much less. Go count how many people are browsing Facebook/etc at the start of the day, lunch, and at the end of the day. Even out of what's becoming an increasingly normal 45 hour workweek (9-6), lots of people are probably working 35 at best.
> For another, anecdotally at least, most people know plenty of people who work longer hours and do it successfully. And most of the really successful people out there will mention that they worked insanely hard at some point. Are they all lying? All wrong?
You're comparing the outliers to the average. Some people will have an almost-linear relationship between hours worked and productivity. For most people, it'll be logarithmic.
Further, lots of bias going on here:
* You remember the successful people who worked hard more, because it furthers the idea that hard work == success
* No one's going to tell you they became successful without working hard. It's a slap in the face to everyone else, and few people are honest/tactless enough to admit they became successful without working hard.
* Most successful people would probably rationalize their success as the result of hard work (and obviously that might be true to some degree)
> The article itself mentions people doing extra hours of coding on personal projects, and we all know some people who have started companies that way. What, do these projects simply not exist? How does that make any sense?
One is self-driven and you can drop it at anytime if things get in the way (children, etc.). The other is imposed on you externally and you can't really go from working 70 hours a week to 40 hours a week. Well, you can - but it almost always involves changing jobs.
> Why does everyone on HN just assume they know better than those people themselves, and set off to make them feel bad and exploited?
Because it's downward pressure on our value as laborers. I mean - that's the real story. If you have to work twice as hard to earn 50% of the salary, your value as a laborer has just been divided by 4.
Very few people want to feel like they're becoming worth less over time. This of course can be offset if the output of your labor has more value to you (e.g. people go to work at non-profits, etc), but in general it's easy to pinpoint why most people resist this kind of pressure.