I have seen quite a few experts in their field and they didn't work long hours but everything they did counted. The problem is that most of us are being overloaded with repetitive, trivial stuff and never get the opportunity do deep thinking and solving difficult challenges. This can't be solved by working more.
You pretty much wrote this but I just want to emphasize that long working hours won't get you ahead but challenging work.
Once you've built that skill set, it makes sense to dial things back because you now know how to be effective and you also probably do tons of mental work semi consciously away from your "desk."
But it drives me crazy how people seem to think they can start out that way. In my experience that is a sure path to modest abilities, which is fine, but that's the trade off.
Maybe. But for sure they worked on something challenging and not on checking off endless lists of JIRA tickets. It's not long hours but quality of work that makes you grow. Both together is probably the winner.
Yeah, that is a much better position to be in than someone who is drowning in useless make-work all day.
But, after having reached this level of good set-up, one is now sort-of in competition with everyone else who has reached a similar good set-up. Well, even just ignoring the competition part, which is maybe a red herring, obviously you are self-gating how good you want to be by working more or fewer hours. So maybe these people decided a certain amount is "good enough" and didn't want to push past that, which is totally fine. But I am just raising the point that you can always push further if you want to.
I have had the opportunity to work on difficult stuff for a few years and after around 35 hours per week I was pretty much shot. I still thought about it in my free time but there definitely was no point sitting in front of the screen because I wouldn't get anything done.
I'll admit there are some high performance workers (you could call them athletes) who can spend 80hrs/week working and producing but these are rare from my experience. Most people I have seen that work 80 hr weeks have a lot of downtime in between. The only difference is they spend that time in the office.
It's a more-than-linear improvement over 40 hours, because when pro-rated you have a lower density of context switches, getting-back-up-to-speed, etc, as happen in the morning or when you eat or such.
Maybe too many people have done long-term damage to their attention spans via the internet? I dunno.
At the risk of being mildly provocative ... are any of the people you know, who can't do more than 40 hours of work in a week, world-class in their field? If not, maybe there is a causal link between these two things?
I'm sure these 80 hour continuous productivity guru's exist. I'm just saying they are so exceedingly rare to effectively be unicorns.
Yes, there are side-effects to any strategy, and often the side-effects from long hours (e.g., burnout, damaged relationships) are far more serious than the side effects of working too little. If there is a lack of progress due to not working enough, my first inclination is to think of ways to work smarter. When I worked long hours, and there was a lack of progress, my first inclination was try working even longer hours.
In my understanding to become an expert requires a careful balance of focused and deliberate work, with alternating periods of rest and reflection.
Doesn't jibe with my experience. The best people I've met have broad curiosity and variety of interests that synergize to make them what they are. This may drive them to spend more time practicing their craft but that's an effect, not a cause.
The raw number of hours with one's butt in an office chair is irrelevant unless it's used wisely.
I'm probably also biased by the culture I grew up in, but this always kind of irritates me when people praise working long hours:
Which one is it, do you love what you do, so it isn't actually work for you after all, or do you just push yourself really hard and therefore create higher standards for your colleagues to be measured by? (which would lead to the general inclusion problem that this is simply easier to do for young white, childless, men discussed by the author)
BUT!
One difference I've found between startups and companies like OP described is how that work is allocated. Working at a startup had me laser focused on things that were directly tied to the business. Working at a big company means I can work on anything I want off the clock. Top performers at my current (bigco) workplace spend their time organizing community events and meetups, or live coding on twitch. Startup work might be like that if you get the perfect project that ties directly to your career ambitions, but for me it was just a particularly demanding job with more responsibility (and more potential upside.)
Am I getting that right? Seems like an odd argument given what I know about your opinion towards head-down traditional game design process.
I feel like I get a lot of software expertise from making gnocchi and watching my chickens scratch around the garden, but maybe I'm fooling myself. Genuinely interested to know your opinion.
My (baseless) opinion is that quality of experiments matters a lot more than sheer number.
If you only work a minimum number of hours within your field, you are unlikely to emerge as one of the peak achievers or thought leaders in your field. That's just because you learn more from experience, and working more hours gives you more experience.
You can extrapolate from there what this means for companies and individuals.
I am not at all saying that companies should ask people to work long hours. (I run a software company, and we are super-lax about hours, people showing up at the office, etc). But I am saying that if an individual wants to be an expert in a particular field, that person should probably work a lot (and probably wants to work a lot anyway, due to interest in the subject). This doesn't necessarily have to be at the company; it could be at home, on personal projects, whatever. But the deeper and more challenging the project is, the better you learn, and it's easier to have one project that is deep and challenging than somehow to have two in parallel. And if only one is deep and challenging, then you are sort of idling with half your time. So there are basically two paths to this kind of deep work: work for a company, make sure you get a project that's really good, and then work hard on it; or go do your own thing, make sure you have enough money somehow, and work hard on what interests you.
This also means that "work-life balance" is not a thing for experts the way it is for normal people. But that's fine, because for these kinds of experts their work is a serious part of their life and the two things are inseparable.
Of course if you don't feel this way about what you're working on, that it is a serious part of your life, then this strategy doesn't make sense; and I would not encourage people who don't feel this way (who are the majority of the population) to work that hard. I am just pointing out that there are some of us for whom a different life strategy is best.