I did this a bit, as a younger man. It was fun, and an easy way to stand out from the crowd. Was nice to get the pat on the back from the boss in the morning "did you go home at all last night?". From a personal development point of view it was a valuable experience because it allowed me to get ahead of the curve and delve into some of the more intricate details of the work.

It's no way to live though, in particular on an ongoing basis. The cost is just too high. I still wouldn't be averse to the odd bit of overwork when it comes to the crunch but these days that's very much as a favour to my employer - and one I know is appreciated.

There is a huge difference.

If expectation is 60 hours, you would need to push 80 hours to stand out the way you did. 60 hours would not get you a pat on the back.

People in finance do it. The difference is that if you push 80 hours for 5 years and you are not culled, the pay becomes massive with senior developer level base salary with contractual guarantee of 150% salary as bonus. You can retire in your early 30's or continue working 80 hours. Except that now 80 hours becomes "management 80 hours" - i.e. just having your phone with you counts as working.

Well I guess it's all about context isn't it?

If you're working in a place where everybody is working 60 hours and competing to be the richest man in the graveyard then yeah it's not much.

But when you're working an extra 2 hours a day on your own then yeah - then that's something. It's all relative.

Also factor in while there is a chance you may be rewarded for a 60 hour week, you are also driving wages overall downwards as two people working 60 hour weeks work the same number of hours as 3 people working 40 hours a week. Thus increasing the total labor pool and decreasing effective demand.

In my opinion you are often doing yourself and your fellow workers a disservice by working that much for free. If you own the company this is a different matter of course.

Also arguably, you probably aren't as productive pro rata working 60 hours as you are 40. So following that to conclusion the 3 people working 40 would be more productive than 2 people working 60.

There are mitigating factors to this i.e. each additional member of your headcount incurs their own cost overhead; also that certain roles and responsibilities can't be serialised so easily.

To be clear, it seemed to be the mutual expectation of everyone in the office. I wasn't doing it for the sake of doing dog and pony tricks with my boss. If I tried to leave at 5 or even 6 (dinner was at 7), I'd get strange looks and raised eyebrows.