This is how I've always explained to people who constantly work overtime in salaried positions where they don't actually get paid for that overtime.

You can at look at it one of 2 ways.

1. Your billable self stopped at the 8-hour mark on a given weekday and every hour after that, including weekends, you're just giving away free labor to the company. Just think about that every time you're working overtime, every minute after 8-hours you're freely giving away to the company. This is your personal free time.

2. Or, like patrickdavey said, you dilute your hourly worth. Say you're a dev who makes $90K, that's roughly $43.xx/hr for a 40 hour work week. But if you're actually working 50hr work weeks you're now worth $34.xx, and so on. The company just saved money on you (or they are making money off you).

Most office environments I've worked at are not rigidly policy-driven, are populated with sensible humans, and the overwhelming majority of my teammates are working for the success of the team and each other.

(I was once promoted en passant, when my first employer wished to inflate the number of Senior Developers assigned to a consulting proposal...)

Large companies that realize losing institutional knowledge is costly put in programs to make sure there are good expectations on what is required to achieve the next position and what the pay-scale range is for the next position (which also helps fight racism/sexism). You see this at Google (and I'm sure many other large companies), who had identified this as a problem that needed to be solved.

There is some research showing that coming in early makes your manager rate you higher. But it seems unrelated to number of hours, ironically. http://qz.com/209513/no-matter-what-the-boss-says-about-flex...

- people on HN have bad jobs with no advancement track for strong technical skills

- people on HN don't want to work their way up, then want it handed to them.

Yes. How terrible would that be. How terrible would it be for someone to have a title / position commiserate to their skills, not how good they are at office politics.

I just don't want my career advancement to be up to the arbitrary whims of someone in a position of authority, that's all.

There are many ways to work your way up that don't involve giving all of your free time away to someone else who may or may not decide to promote you for it.

What about those of us who don't have strictly defined roles like that? Where I work you're basically just a programmer. Experience has always seemed to count more for me than an arbitrary title.

So many people, especially in tech, work jobs that pay really, really, really well compared to most people and piss it away on stupid shit. You can choose to save a lot of that money instead and still have a very good and fulfilling life.

Eventually, when you have enough savings/investments to cover you for a few years, your life changes. You don't have to worry so much if people are getting laid off, or if your job starts demanding unreasonable things.

Here's the article that brought me to that video, and goes more in depth about the concept. I highly recommend it - http://jlcollinsnh.com/2011/06/06/why-you-need-f-you-money/

Or you can drive a Tesla.

I bet I know which one makes you feel better when you put your head on your pillow at night.

As I've thought about my investments, I've also struggled with the notion that I'm very heavily in non-dividend paying equities. While my growth has been great, I'm not really deriving any passive investment income to offset my living expenses (presumably for the opportunity for a higher rate of growth).

Do many that aim for this tend to focus more on dividend and income-providing investments instead, despite the lower rates of return?

I think this is important anywhere, not just programming. When I was younger, I worked at several fast food places. There was a Burger King job I left within 2 weeks because they had me working insane amounts of unpaid overtime. When I told them I would be leaving they essentially tried to bully me into staying. "We may not be paying you in full, but if you leave you'll be making no money, and that's much worse. You don't have another job waiting, it's just a bad idea to quit. You could become homeless!"

Thankfully I was living with my parents at the time and could tell BK to screw themselves. But I feel really bad for other employees in that same situation who either fell for the spiel or legitimately couldn't afford to be jobless for a day.