I'd be happy not to be hired by such a manager. Crunch time happens sometimes, and you gotta do what you gotta do. But 60 hour weeks as a matter of course are a dealbreaker for me.

They are a deal-breaker for me, too, at 35 as they were at 30.

I gotta get a giggle. Not that I'm mocking 60 hour work weeks, that's still a lot of hours no doubt. But whenever I read 60 hour work weeks as a big deal I just think back to my time as a chef. I think the max I capped out was 120 hours a week, and I did that for 5 weeks straight before contracting pneumonia due to a cold I got sometime within that period. Never again. Hell...10 hours of work per week is enough to discourage me these days heh.

I disagree. I have read articles like http://lifehacker.com/working-over-40-hours-a-week-makes-you... which claim that over 40 hrs a week on average, for average people, will have lower productivity. I get that sometimes people have to work over 40 hours a week, and then follow it with extended periods of rest. An example is tax accountants. But for continuous producers like executives or engineers imo they are more interested in volume of work completed in 1 year than fastest single week/month.

It does look like there are a lot of entrepreneurial and also some employment positions which are not suitable for average people, I agree.

More like, I won't "hire" him. Hiring is a two way street.

Always ask about how much overtime is expected from a job during interviews. If you don't believe in >40 hour work weeks, except maybe under rare conditions, then don't "hire" your prospective employer.

But once a recruiter has this type of experience with a few older candidates, they will be more likely to discount older candidates in the future, regardless of whether those later individuals were willing to do 60+ hour weeks or not.

Then that recruiter should schedule themselves for a rectal occipital extraction :)

At the risk of sounding like an apologist for ageism -- why?

There's no magic button you can push in your brain that says 'don't form conditional expectations based on protected categories'. If you're a recruiter and older candidates keep blowing you off, would you really continue to put in the same amount of effort to try to recruit them, even if you consciously attempted to?