The least productive places I've worked had the longest hours - companies in Japan and Taiwan. Lots of time fuckin around on phones, and the obligatory period from 5pm - 8pm to "wait for the boss to go home" was almost entirely filled with Candy Crush. Stupid.

haha, yeah, I've never seen anyone so unproductive as a Japanese or Chinese engineer putting in 72 hours a week

I think this whole system of paying people an hourly wage or a salary is toxic when it comes to knowledge work. I'm pretty confident that today I could do something in a day that would have taken me a month when I started out 10 years ago. (And I can do stuff that would have been inconceivable when I was at the college student/new hire level) But I'm only making about 2-3x as much as a new hire at my current company.

I wish the whole system were a lot more freeform and mercenary.. I'd love to roll in and spend a few months building some GPU firmware or debugging camera latency issues, collect $100k at the end, and then spend a few months backpacking or whatever.

I guess that only a tiny fraction of the people I've met would be OK with that sort of existence, though..

Wouldn't work sharing among collegues be quite toxic? Who would pick the need to be done-paperwork or whatever time consuming less glamourus tasks when the collegues do the glamourus quicker tasks and go home.

I've met people that are perfectly content doing mundane tasks for a set amount of time, then going home to watch TV or whatever. It's unlikely to find them on this site though...

If I pulled up the bounty board and had the choice between "Dig latrines for 20 hours: $3,000" and "Fire-breathing dragon terrorizing village, scales impervious to arrows: $80,000" I could go either way myself

"Maybe I'll take a break on the ultra-rare deadlock and go bang out some python test scripts for a few days.."

Sounds like too many places are willing to pay young developers too much. Why pay a third what they pay you for an order of magnitude less value?

Are they paying young devs too much or OP too little?

Surely the boss realises what is going on in that kind of case? I guess they are a slave to the culture just as much as those beneath them?

Yea, I mean, slave is a strong word but they're fully "indoctrinated" to it. Like many elders in any given culture. Nothing surprising imo.

I had a job once where we worked 35 hours a week. I agree, you had little time to mess around. Yet, I felt like I managed to get everything done on time.