Cutting your salary by 40%

The quantity of bugs popping up and code quality haven't got what I'd call a well-understood relationship. How do you reconcile that?

>> But aren't you just trading the location of work for the most part? I get that experience from within my firm on projects I'm working on while others still work on their skills just outside their employment? It is still "work" in a sense.

Not really because it doesn't feel like work. You don't have to code in your free time, you can go out with family / gf / friends and do some fun social activity, you can do sports to maintain healthy and fit body, you can travel, read a good book etc... so you get the choice how to spend your free time.

For example with sports, if you are working 80 hours per week it is not possible to do any sport seriously. You need at least 5-6 hours per week if you want to really get good at any sport. It is also incredibly unhealthy to work 16 hours per day. You are literally destroying your body.

And if you decide to write code or do something technical in your free time you are in charge of defining the project you will work on, interesting in AI/machine learning, big data, distributed systems, specific algorithms or problems? You can work on the exact problem that intrigues you. Can't do that for a company as your work is not decided by you.

>> I realize many don't get the same intellectual benefit from employment that i enjoy but trashing people who do and take advantage of it doesn't seem appropriate.

I am not trashing anybody. Just saying that you don't need to work 80 hours per week to get promoted and progress in your career. Quality and productivity matters, not hours you spend sitting in the office.

"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."

Maybe the gov't set the standard informed by our biology?

Actually 40 hours isn't "exact". It's close though. Why?

First weekends. Weekends mean that a 7 day week has 5 work days. Typically weekends are still off (bros' gotta climb El Capitan). If instead of 2 days off every 7 we had 1 every 10 (a failed metric innovation pushed during the French Revolution) we would work 26% more, or 50 hours/week @ 8 hours a day. I don't know that 2 of 7 gives us much more needed reset than 1 of 10, but that would be a sucky weekend.

To test, at an interview try to hire someone with "we work 11.1 hour days, 9 days in a row". 11.1 hour days 9/10 days = 70 hour 5/7 weeks. You'd hire no one.

So 2-7 weekends are the first restraint.

Then we have our biology. 8 hours of sleep (give or take an hour or two), leaving 16 hours.

Not doing the same activity for 16 hours straight is necessary for all humans except the most severe case of autism. 8 hours to bath, eat, greet your spouse, play with your kids, ect. These are things we're evolutionarily wired to do btw (we're social beings whose parents both contribute, typically, to child rearing).

So why 40h? Could be 30 (B. Russell argued 100 years ago that we need half that). Could be 50. Having a balanced life @ 60hr weeks (12 hr work days) is already impossible.

Finally, I want to point out two things:

1. I really doubt any of these 70hr. proponents will out-produce a 70 year old Carthusian monk who make their hipster beers. And they spend most of their days praying. Why? These monks are focused. We're all dibbling about on Facebook. 70 hrs? @ 100% yeah right! More like 70 hrs @ 30%!

2. Most developers live in our own filth (kinda hard to clean @ 70 hr weeks). That's literally[x] unbecoming.

[x] to be human is to, among other things, have a sense of aesthetic beauty and to be an animal is to have some basic sense of self-care. Even high order animals take care of/decorate where they live. Therefore, to live in our own filth, to neglect our hygiene, is to reject or very nature. Therefore, we are literally unbecoming.

Are you interested in working remotely?

Well said. I share your suspicions about 40 turning out to be the magic number. I also notice that these articles never seem to allow for differences between people, which flies in the face of my 25 years of experience. I've always felt most comfortable working seven days a week, at a manageable pace each day. Other people need those weekends, and are happy to put in long hours in the week. One of the most productive people I ever worked with seemed to work literally all the time.

As for whether or not it's "exploitive", I'm sure it is, under some circumstances. Some poor dev, trapped by an H1-B, getting ground up with hours upon hours of billable work, for example. But a lot of us are paid through equity. In such a case it's perfectly reasonable to sacrifice for the good of the company in which you have a stake.