And the argument with extra hours working on personal projects is ridiculous. As a matter of fact I am a heavy open source contributor and work on numerous projects in my personal time, some of them already have many hundreds of hours invested time in them. I choose to work on them for free because they interest me.

If you want me to spend that extra time working on the company instead then don't expect me to do it for free. You are basically asking to own my free time which is ridiculous.

Overtimes and their compensation should be clearly defined in the contract, otherwise you can't expect to take employees' free unpaid time outside of work hours.

I agree with you that we should be fairly compensated, but I also agree that the dogma of "40 is the max a worker can be productive, possibly less" is wrong in a large number of cases.

But its quite important to make a distinction between manufacturing work, repetitive physical labor, and mental work. Different organs are involved and they function differently. As nice as some might imagine it would be to only employ machines, in reality we still have to put bathrooms in the workplace, give people a lunch break, and admit that they're sacks of meat. They've got limits, and ignoring them will never be productive.

However my point was that when negotiating salary you can't really say "I can be productive 70 hours per week" and therefor ask for 40% higher salary. It doesn't work that way and what you negotiate is based on your skills mostly in comparison to other people who are assumed to put in cca 40 hours per week.

So even if you can be productive for 70 hours per week, I wouldn't do it and instead invest that time in your family and yourself, making your life outside of work richer and more fulfilling. Otherwise you will just be working for free the extra 40% of the time and never be compensated for it by most companies.

Finally, you only have one life so spending most of your life in the office or commuting in and out of office is quite a waste of your time. You should use your free time to enjoy your life imho and experience more things.

Is that constant heads down, in the zone coding, or does that include some coding, some management, some marketing, etc? Also, how long can you do that for? 5 years straight?

I typically work in bursts. If I don't have an outlet in between bursts (surfing, 30 minute tv show, walk, etc), the longer it takes to get back into a burst. Being in an office doesn't offer much as far as outlets go.

Obviously it isn't constant 8 hours of heads down, in the zone coding, there are things in between and also meetings and planning often takes time. I used to work longer before but as you say, that is not sustainable for a long run, you can do it for couple of years before you burn out.

I also used to do quite a lot of extra work in the evenings and weekends when I had sudden inspiration / urge to refactor or improve some piece of code. But I don't do that anymore and instead use that free time for myself and my hobbies :)

If I feel an urge to write some code on Sunday, I will work on one of my open source projects or contribute to some other projects out there if they interest me or I will experiment with new tech to keep my skills up to date.

And making your colleagues look bad if you aren't letting EVERYONE know that you are working more hours!

It's not in the slightest bit down to convenience. It's because 40 hours was quite simply discovered to be a more productive length of day, well over a century ago, back in the later stages of the industrial revolution.

In the US, if memory serves, the move to a 40 hour working week largely started out at the Ford Motor company back in the early 1900s, after Henry Ford experimented reducing hours and discovered that the number of mistakes made by workers went down drastically, and productivity increased. This swept across the industry because the improvements were impossible to deny. Slowly but surely that spread across other industries until it became the staple.

40 hours isn't done by custom, it's done because it's proven to be the most productive working week. This isn't a case of scientists discovering that "what people are used to is what they're most productive at". For most of the industrial revolution people worked 12hr+ days, and that was considered, even by the labour force, to be perfectly acceptable. Hauling that back to 8 hour days was a herculean task that no major factory owner was going to do without damn good evidence that it would improve things.

That's a relatively biased misreading of the history of the 8 hour day. You're implying that science and factory owners decided on it. Yet the labor movement, industrial action and strife played an outsized role. The 8 hour day movement is an old one (http://www.pbs.org/livelyhood/workday/weekend/8hourday.html), and the call for 8 hours was echoed by the labor movement for decades after.

That was true when most of the workforce was doing manual and factory style labour. To the best of my knowledge it hasn't been rigorously reproduced for works that spend their days staring at a screen thinking.

I'm also wondering how commute time (and method of commute) factors into this. Does 30 minutes of physically strenuous cycling before/after work have a positive or negative impact on office workers? Does the same time spent in a car navigating stop'n'go traffic have a different effect? Both involve some element of mental effort, but both are quite different from the rest of the days tasks. Certainly in my experience one helped my mental state and one didn't.

Anecdotally, I once moved from having an hour long commute to a 5 minutes walk from work. I did end up leaving, but I feel that I enjoyed life much more living close to the office. Getting an extra two hours every day allowed me to enjoy life much more.

Absolutely. I'm at least as convinced that 35 hours is optimal time as I am that 45 is. I also agree with your point about commutes. Instead of looking at time in the office it probably makes more sense to look at the time from when one leaves home to when one leaves the office. And speaking only for myself, having to drive 30 minutes to work each morning would be a pretty major deal-breaker for any job I'd consider.

Unfortunately the 40-hour week seems to have been among the last big wins of the US labor movement. Hence the popular (on HN at least) idea that this win was the result of Ford's top-down pioneering.

http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/ford-factory-work...

If you think Ford ran the best scientific business, you'd have to include this as well: http://jalopnik.com/when-henry-fords-benevolent-secret-polic...

"To qualify for his doubled salary, the worker had to be thrifty and continent. He had to keep his home neat and his children healthy, and, if he were below the age of twenty-two, to be married.

What started out as a team of 50 “Investigators” eventually morphed into a team of 200 people who probed every aspect of their employees lives. And I mean every aspect.

Investigators would show up unannounced at your home, just to make sure it was being kept clean. They’d ask questions that were less appropriate of a car company, than they were for the modern-day CIA. They’d query you about your spending habits, your alcohol consumption, even your marital relationships. They’d ask what you were buying, and they’d check on your children to make sure they were in school.

Women weren’t eligible, unless they were single and had to support children. Men weren’t eligible unless the only work their wives did was in the home.

.... spiritual smelting process where the impurities of foreignness were burnt off as slag to be tossed away leaving a new 100% American.

you needed the company’s permission if you wanted to buy a car, which included a requirement to be married and have children. "

and Ford himself retracted the whole philosophy:

"It was also highly controversial, and because of the competing economic, and ironically, societal factors, it was slowly wound down. Even Henry Ford himself found that he was against many of the program’s aspects, writing in his 1922 autobiography:

“paternalism has no place in industry. Welfare work that consists in prying into employees’ private concerns is out of date. Men need counsel and men need help, often special help; and all this ought to be rendered for decency’s sake. But the broad workable plan of investment and participation will do more to solidify industry and strengthen organization than will any social work on the outside. Without changing the principle we have changed the method of payment.”

Seriously though -- I'd like to read more about that. Do you have a source?

Relevant in case you think "Henry Ford thought of the idea, therefore it is correct."

It's probably not, for thought workers at least. The correct value is probably lower - closer to 30 hours a week. There have been studies which have begun to correlate this, but I don't have them off hand.

40 hours is for manual, repetitive labor. And from my limited experience doing manual, repetitive labor when I was younger it's a pretty good number. I wasn't so exhausted I couldn't do anything at home after work, and I had the weekends to spend with friends and family.

Working hard is a personal choice, but the chances are pretty good that the quality of work is going to drop as the hours pass.

In fact even when looking at myself, many times I was "working" lots of hours but in reality I wasn't getting anything done. When I work 40 or less hours and take lots of breaks during the day I got way more done than when I had just been a seat warmer for 70+ hours per week. This is likely due to the fact that having rest periods and breaks allow my brains diffuse mode to also help solve problems. Many of my best ideas come when I'm lifting or playing basketball at the gym.

You are not getting the best version of a person when they chose to work lots of hours and refuse to take time out for themselves. Our brains need plenty of rest in order to function optimally.

Others though, not so much. In programming, you also get better by doing it more. So even if it's not "for work", if you have side projects, you will (generally) be better than those who don't, from pure practice. The super high salaries don't just reflect a higher demand: they also reflect an expectation of higher expected output than in other professions. It's implied that you'll spend the time to stay on top of things, stay up to date with technology and other things that may require more time than your weekly allocation of jira tickets.

There's a guy in my team who probably works 60+ hours a week. I warned him about burning out, told him he didn't have to (as his manager), etc. He does it for fun. Because he enjoys it. And he's amazingly productive. He's not doing it for a promotion either, he's already pretty much at the highest level the role can be.

And while a lot of people SAY they are "more productive" working less, often it's not true. One of my buddies keep spouting that, and honestly doesn't get much done. Another also repeats it AND is the most productive person I know.

Essentially, your millage will vary, but only rarely are people at the very tip top manage to do more with less time. Some do, but they're essentially gods among mortals (or lying to themselves about it).

Personally, I generally work about 40 hours a week, but I don't pretend I'm doing more than others. I just do what I feel I'm paid for while also pursuing my career goals to go up the ladder by doing what's best for my employer.

At that level of time investment, he doesn't have time for a romantic relationship. Almost no one would be crazy to accept so little attention, but even if they would it would be a weak & shallow relationship. They probably don't have time for friendships or even spending time with their family and socialising, which will take its psychological toll.

Unless they magically find time to do some sports and take care not to sit in a chair all time, they're stressing their body a lot, which could lead to a weaker immune system and potentially musculo-skeletal problems.

In conclusion, one can behave like a machine and work 60+ hour weeks, but they're literally trading away their life in order to achieve that.

Get ready to search for a replacement or two for when/if they burn out.

If someone works 12 hour days, and then implements the, and it hurts me to even type it out, "lifestyle hacks" to further squeeze the sponge of productive hours, the sacrifice they make to their own personal lives is a big toll. 12 hour days, plus commute, plus 8 hours of sleep leaves little time for socializing, hobbies and let alone exercise.

But the bigger tragedy is, on a team where there might be competition (eg., a bonus), the guy pissing his life into his work is going to get the accolades and bonuses, or at least it looks that way, which takes a morale toll on the other members of the group. It leads to a race to the bottom.

This might be okay when you're junior, first starting out, or a partner, or someone with significant equity (read: in a few years they won't need to work), but for everyone else, there is a very high risk of a toxic work situation.

To the person above who said that we're highly paid and so forth and expected to perform - well we're not paid because we're expected to perform highly, we're paid because laws supply and demand at present benefit us. If a situation should arise where the balance of the scales reverts, I assure you you'd still be completing your beloved 12 hour days with a much smaller salary.

The problem is that people don't socialize at all out of work still have those pesky communication needs. And they use meetings to fulfill them ... slowing everyone down. And what used to be one sentence affair is suddenly 30 minutes long hard to stop chat, because lonely people need to talk. Or one person job is suddenly two person job for no reason other then one of them lack socialization.

And since they dont mind spending there 12 hours a day, they organize things in a way that makes it impossible for other people to come home sooner. Meaning that meetings are late, important information is passed late etc.

And oftentimes means that tired people make more bugs and do less rational decisions. So they insist on work that does not need to be done right away to be done right away for no reason other then fear.

But really, if you replace things like kids, videogames, netflix, long commutes from the suburbs, spending time with extended families you don't care about, etc, it honestly puts the balance in favor of the person working 60 hours a week.

Now, if they don't ENJOY IT, and they rather be doing those other things, then they should do these other things. Else it is unhealthy, both physically and mentally.

But if I just take my work days + time spent playing videogames + my side projects/blogs/whatever, I come way above 60 hours a week. Sacrifice that and it comes easy.

If it came in the form of additional financial security and it lets you hire someone to clean the house, you might come up even more ahead. The important part is you have to do what you do because you want to.

So the main issue really is that that person will have what other perceive as an unfair advantage, career wise, and THAT's what all of this is all about. People in general are pretty uncomfortable with the idea that someone else is getting ahead of them because they decided to finish that prototype instead of watching Netflix tonight.

From my observations, relationships don't depend on how much people work, they depend on how much of their free time both partners like to spend together.

Figure 30-60 minutes getting ready in the morning, a 30 minute commute, a 12 hour work day (12.5 with lunch!), a 30 minute commute back, 30 minutes for dinner, and 8 hours of sleep. That's about 22-23 hours of the day. Assuming you spend a grand total of 1-2 hours with your partner, and you do all the things you need to do to be a functioning adult (laundry, dishes, home maintenance if you don't rent, etc) on the weekends.

Or you can work at a company that respects its employees and is close by. From the time I leave my house to the time I come back is less than 9 hours every day, and that includes my commute and 45-60 minutes for lunch (not at my desk).

Translated: some people can handle an 80+ hr/week lifestyle, while others can't fathom it at all.

The biggest loss wasn't any of what was listed above. No, I knew about the risks and accepted them because I was passionate about creating and contributing. Now the passion is gone. Working and trying to improve causes so much dissonance, like trying to swallow roast beef that always seems to cause food poisoning.

Why would using your left-over time and effort for a side project that may improve your life a bad thing? Does your employer have the right to "own" that effort as well?

If so I think the pay scales need some adjusting.

As for whether or not it's "exploitive", I'm sure it is, under some circumstances. Some poor dev, trapped by an H1-B, getting ground up with hours upon hours of billable work, for example. But a lot of us are paid through equity. In such a case it's perfectly reasonable to sacrifice for the good of the company in which you have a stake.

40 hours is essentially a useful measuring stick and the accepted standard.

Now I do agree that for some people they can and do work long hours and greatly enjoy this and good luck to them. I have to assume they are working at a company where they do work they love and are proud of. I think of employees at SpaceX, Tesla, video game companies for gamer type developers and NASA.

I interviewed at a large game developer a long time ago and was asked back for a second interview. After I discovered they regularly worked past 7:30 at night I declined. I do not play video games so for me the draw was not there but I could absolutely understand how that could be someones passion and they love what they do.

For me I value my family time and when comparing jobs prefer to compare apples to apples and the main way barring a very unique work place is to compare dollars earned per hour worked (including benefits).

To your point though if someone wants to be there, they are making an informed choice and they believe it is an amazing opportunity then more power to them.

There are a lot of startups who work "smart and hard" and they don't go anywhere, and there are a lot of startups that are successful despite having spent very little, real effort on their product, because startup success is orthogonal to hours-worked. It's much more important to know the right people who can make the right introductions to investors and press.

People are not reliable narrators. If you ask a person to list off everything they've done in a day, without prior preparation to know they were supposed to remember everything, they will likely forget vast swaths of activities, busy work, and goofing off they performed as a matter of routine. I know a lot of people who claim to be busy all the time just because they are in the office for 80+ hours a week, but I know for a fact they spend most of it trawling Twitter and HN. Yes, that means they are sum-total working less than 40 hours a week.

It's extremely difficult to measure the impact of decisions on productivity when you're even trying, say nothing about when you're anecdotally claiming your success is due to habitual overtime. A person who habitually works overtime has no idea of whether they are being more productive or less than they would be if they worked fewer hours, because they never work fewer hours to be able to compare.

There are other confounding factors, but to me, these are the biggest.

You're right, it's probably actually much less. Go count how many people are browsing Facebook/etc at the start of the day, lunch, and at the end of the day. Even out of what's becoming an increasingly normal 45 hour workweek (9-6), lots of people are probably working 35 at best.

> For another, anecdotally at least, most people know plenty of people who work longer hours and do it successfully. And most of the really successful people out there will mention that they worked insanely hard at some point. Are they all lying? All wrong?

You're comparing the outliers to the average. Some people will have an almost-linear relationship between hours worked and productivity. For most people, it'll be logarithmic.

Further, lots of bias going on here:

* You remember the successful people who worked hard more, because it furthers the idea that hard work == success

* No one's going to tell you they became successful without working hard. It's a slap in the face to everyone else, and few people are honest/tactless enough to admit they became successful without working hard.

* Most successful people would probably rationalize their success as the result of hard work (and obviously that might be true to some degree)

> The article itself mentions people doing extra hours of coding on personal projects, and we all know some people who have started companies that way. What, do these projects simply not exist? How does that make any sense?

One is self-driven and you can drop it at anytime if things get in the way (children, etc.). The other is imposed on you externally and you can't really go from working 70 hours a week to 40 hours a week. Well, you can - but it almost always involves changing jobs.

> Why does everyone on HN just assume they know better than those people themselves, and set off to make them feel bad and exploited?

Because it's downward pressure on our value as laborers. I mean - that's the real story. If you have to work twice as hard to earn 50% of the salary, your value as a laborer has just been divided by 4.

Very few people want to feel like they're becoming worth less over time. This of course can be offset if the output of your labor has more value to you (e.g. people go to work at non-profits, etc), but in general it's easy to pinpoint why most people resist this kind of pressure.

You have it reversed. Get a sample of people working 70 hours a week and see how many are successful by some chosen measure compared to those who work 40 hours.

If you're working on something you love and are good at, you're going to be productive longer. I think just measuring hours is missing the point.

I have zero interest in handing the rest of my free time over to my employer, especially for free.

The people who pull 70+ hour weeks successfully tend to have an abnormally high tolerance to stress as well as an abnormally high 'drive'. I'd be willing to bet there's a genetic component.

Or else they're just killing themselves. I'd be interested to see how they do in the long-term.

"The article itself mentions people doing extra hours of coding on personal projects, and we all know some people who have started companies that way. What, do these projects simply not exist? How does that make any sense?"

There's a huge difference between working on something for me, for which I have total ownership of, and working on something just to make someone else rich.

Now, people will vary in this, but as a general metric, if you try to get programmers to routinely put in long hours, you're on to a loser.

Personal projects are different, and are not generally deadline-riven stress-fests.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day

Personally, I think that our economy is technologically productive enough, and the nature of work has changed enough in many work places, that we should be considering a shorter standard workweek.

I mean, why do you think people arrived at the 40hour/week metric? How do you think we came to standardize on it?

You might buy into the work long hours mythos of startups, but simply restating it doesn't make you any more right.

Isn't this standard fare for socialists and technocrats that HN is flooded with?

Maybe the gov't set the standard informed by our biology?

Actually 40 hours isn't "exact". It's close though. Why?

First weekends. Weekends mean that a 7 day week has 5 work days. Typically weekends are still off (bros' gotta climb El Capitan). If instead of 2 days off every 7 we had 1 every 10 (a failed metric innovation pushed during the French Revolution) we would work 26% more, or 50 hours/week @ 8 hours a day. I don't know that 2 of 7 gives us much more needed reset than 1 of 10, but that would be a sucky weekend.

To test, at an interview try to hire someone with "we work 11.1 hour days, 9 days in a row". 11.1 hour days 9/10 days = 70 hour 5/7 weeks. You'd hire no one.

So 2-7 weekends are the first restraint.

Then we have our biology. 8 hours of sleep (give or take an hour or two), leaving 16 hours.

Not doing the same activity for 16 hours straight is necessary for all humans except the most severe case of autism. 8 hours to bath, eat, greet your spouse, play with your kids, ect. These are things we're evolutionarily wired to do btw (we're social beings whose parents both contribute, typically, to child rearing).

So why 40h? Could be 30 (B. Russell argued 100 years ago that we need half that). Could be 50. Having a balanced life @ 60hr weeks (12 hr work days) is already impossible.

Finally, I want to point out two things:

1. I really doubt any of these 70hr. proponents will out-produce a 70 year old Carthusian monk who make their hipster beers. And they spend most of their days praying. Why? These monks are focused. We're all dibbling about on Facebook. 70 hrs? @ 100% yeah right! More like 70 hrs @ 30%!

2. Most developers live in our own filth (kinda hard to clean @ 70 hr weeks). That's literally[x] unbecoming.

[x] to be human is to, among other things, have a sense of aesthetic beauty and to be an animal is to have some basic sense of self-care. Even high order animals take care of/decorate where they live. Therefore, to live in our own filth, to neglect our hygiene, is to reject or very nature. Therefore, we are literally unbecoming.