What bothers me is the people that are happy to be a <1 developer. Or even a <0 developer, whose benefit to the team is net negative.
We can't all be above average. So we are either all 1 developper, or some of us are bound to be less.
If it ever gets to the point where everyone is floating somewhere between 0.9 and 1.1, I’ll revise my statement.
When they're spending all their working hours on one topic they're taking a huge personal sacrifice which is invisible to their employer while at the same time raising the expectations towards their colleagues. If there's for example two such maniacs in a team, the rest can say goodbye to promotions and raises even if they're actually just as good but don't sacrifice their life at the altar of programming.
That said I'm the 40 hour guy. I want to work to live not live to work. That will make me less of a developer than others but I think I still bring value to my work place. I don't want to look back on a life lived in a cubicle.
Realistically, I've never met any programmer who has more than 4 to 6 (on a really good day) hours of solidly useful work in them per day.
Time spent above that, and those 20+ hours above 40, are invariably spent spinning wheels and making mistakes from fatigue, etc. and I think ought to be discouraged in sensibly run orgs.
* Missing key insights which would shave a large percentage of work off of the project.
* Making mistakes in architectural decisions, which require hours of extra mundane boilerplate work.
* Introducing difficult-to-reproduce bugs which require hours, days or weeks debugging
* Destroying key hardware which needs to be re-acquired (if that's the kind of thing you work on).
At this point in my career I'm of the opinion that asking teams to pull late nights and weekends is actually detrimental to project timelines, over anything longer than a single day. All it does is reassure PHBs that maximum effort is being made.
The 10x engineers that I’ve interacted with can be found working on nights and weekends because they enjoy it and have nothing better to do.
Working those nights and weekends without coworker interruption also means that they get to learn more things freely rather than being interrupted.
As a result they tend to be highly productive, but I’d argue that it could be seen as unfair to the rest of the employees who want to live a balanced life.