Stop Glorifying Hard Work and Long Hours

As far as I'm concerned, if I have to work more than 40 hours to earn my keep, that means the work is of marginal importance and we should really be discussing either (a) hiring more people to handle this glut of grunt work, or (b) not doing it, focusing instead on higher-yield stuff. A programmer's salary is low enough in comparison to value-add that 15 hours per week is break-even, unless the work being assigned is of unusually low importance. So a 60-hour mandate is a sign that we're making up for a lack of strategy through sheer effort, and that never works out in the long run.

On the other hand, working twice as hard to learn twice as fast (or to have twice as good an insight into what it worth working on) is a different story. That can be worth it, because it often ends up making huge differences. If you think of a skill set as an asset, the difference between 10% per year and 5% per year, taken out over 30 years, is that one portfolio does 4.32x and the other does 17.45x-- massive difference. Also, knowledge's time value is such that one might have to work hard (at least in spurts) to get and use the high-yield knowledge.

Could it possibly be that people work at different paces, have different work ethic, and have different aspirations, but that they can't be compared at face value purely on the hours worked? Just because you work less hours, doesn't necessarily imply you're doing the work "smarter," it probably just means that you are only doing the required the work. It is possible that I work much "smarter" than you do and still work 50-60 hours work weeks because I am doing twice the required work. This isn't that bizarre if you are really trying to cover a large amount of the material that exists in CS beyond making cool, hip web-apps and mobile sites. In that case, you might NEED to put in extra work since you are possibly taking on two jobs: one as an employee and one as a student.

That being said, I recall a lot of people making this argument to me as I progressed through school and every activity I've done. They claimed the exact same thing about being the "real geniuses" (please don't fool yourself here) because they learned how to work "smarter"; which usually came down to putting in ONLY the minimally required hours, constantly calculating their grade to make sure it was high enough for them to fail the tests and still pass with a C, and overall cutting corners. You want to know what I saw happen to those people? Failure. These are the same people who were high school dropouts or got kicked out of college for not doing the work. Here's the thing, in a world where the job market is extremely competitive, your stubbornness to work "unreasonable" hours is purely a weakness and hardly a strength. You can have all of knowledge in the world and truly be a "real genius," but if your boss can't confirm your work ethic, you still don't have a job. Oh, and good luck starting/running a business with your 35 hours work weeks.

Finally, you should probably apologize to those of us who are hard workers out there for being purely insulting. As if CEOs and CTOs and great hackers all over the world worked somehow less "smart" than you did because they worked hard hours and slept underneath their desks. Sometimes to excel and to surpass yourself, you have to sacrifice and change the pace of things. Do you really think Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Larry Page, Steve Jobs, etc, got where they were by saying "well, I've done 35 hours of 'smart' work now, I need to stop an meditate?" Well, maybe, but they definitely didn't start like that. And god forbid you have to take care of a family and multiple children. Do you think your spouse is going to be happy with "Oh, I already did my 35 hours of 'smartly' raising the kids and providing for the family, I'm done now."

There are reasons that people "glorify" the hard work and long hours they put into things; they are proud of their work. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure this out. If your twitter friends are "humble brag"-ers, get new friends. But don't pretend everyone who loves to share their hard work is trying to shame you or brag about it.

We're all mortal. Even computers have a finite number of ticks on this earth. Time should not be jail-time, where you try to make it pass quickly, which feels like being dead already. It should be child-time, where you look forward to each second and are spent and saddened when it's over.

Which tool? The tool who called the meeting? Har-har... I'm here all week.

But seriously, I think you make a good point. There's an equally good counterpoint, which is that most people can't do this well. Would training help? Or are some people congenitally boring and disorganized (the two are related, I think)?