In Defense of the 60+ Hour Work Week

I have worked 60+ hour weeks for significant periods of time and in various roles, including as CTO of a dot-com startup and as a trader at Morgan Stanley.

I differentiate between working long hours for yourself (e.g. as a business owner or startup founder) versus for someone else (i.e. as an employee). My observations here are generally about situations where you're working for someone else (although some have general relevance). For business owners and founders, motivations and rewards are very different, and I think that, for them, the decision to work long hours or not is a far more subjective and personal one.

I don't think there's anything intrinsically bad about working long hours, as long as it is the exception (and for relatively short periods of time), rather than the rule. For example, if you're working for a startup and you've got a big product launch coming up, it makes absolute sense to put in extra effort in the run-up to the deadline to add new functionality, eradicate bugs, etc. However, if you are expected to put in 60-hour weeks as a matter of course, that's not good. Work-Life balance is important (and gets more important as you get older).

If you are expected to put in 60-hour weeks as a matter of course and your boss doesn't, I would advise you to quit that job as quickly as it is feasible to do so.

Working long hours wears you down, especially in roles where high concentration is required. I used to work 12-hour days as a trader and, come the weekend, I'd be so exhausted that I'd usually sleep in on Saturday and Sunday until the early afternoon. That's not a good lifestyle.

I also believe that working long hours has a negative impact on creativity and the ability to make intuitive leaps. In my experience, taking a break and stepping back from a difficult problem can often yield a solution. If your work hours do not allow your brain enough downtime from work to disengage from your work problems and engage other things (beyond simply resting), your productivity is likely to take a significant hit, in my opinion.

Finally, there's the impact on your mood. If you're not actually enjoying working long hours, it's likely to make you impatient and irritable, and that will have a knock-on effect on the atmosphere at work.

Certain types of companies (law firms and investment banks, for example) seem to rely heavily on getting more junior people to work long hours. They're able to do that because the rewards that come with climbing the corporate ladder are significant - partners and managing directors get paid a lot of money and, in order to have a chance of getting promoted to that level, you have to serve your time and put in long hours. For many young (and, some might say, foolish) people, the long-term carrot (Ferrari-level income) outweighs the downside of having practically no life during one's 20s. Because of that, I think their decision is closer in nature to a business owner's or startup founder's than a pure employee's.

Bottom line (and TL;DR): It's up to each individual to make their own decision based on their motivations and personal circumstances.

You commented on the article but you didn't read the article? I'm not surprised you got a downvote.

How does your average Silicon Valley 60+ hour worker get extra compensation for those additional hours that are expected of him (beyond the contractually agreed 40 hours)?

Well, yeah, leaders need to lead from the front, or at least give a strong impression of doing so. Otherwise, people will ask your question, and for good reason.

You're the one claiming there's a huge body of research disproving his claims. Your link upthread points to stuff that supports his argument and other stuff that counts as weak evidence against. Nowhere is there anything remotely like disproof. You can also find evidence (e.g. in http://cmdept.unl.edu/drb/Reading/overtime2.htm from the link above) that how you structure your work and rest periods can improve your production. After all, somebody doing office work 60 hours a week with some regular exercise is probably going to outperform somebody like me, who's fat and doesn't exercise. I certainly outperform myself on days that I walk to the office instead of driving. There's clearly some variance involved in individual employees' age, health, height, diet, and attitude, so it should be obvious that you can't just talk about averages over the construction industry and apply them to programming, and to all programmers, with the degree of certainty that you hold.