As a non-manager I'd like to add it also normalizes healthy work hours to all the employees. I've worked places where one or two devs outpaced everyone else by a fair margin because of the hours they put in. They're usually very skilled developers, but they're also putting in double the hours of anyone else. Management of course always praises their output and calls them "rockstars" or something, while ignoring the fact that they were in the office until 9pm every day this week and have dozens of commits in the past month that occured on Saturdays from Noon to 3AM.

Ignoring my personal feelings of how unhealthy I think this is for them in the long run, I just simply don't want to feel like I'm competing with them. And yeah not all workplaces feel like a competition, but in my experience the places where you constantly hear "I was up until 10 fixing that bug, but I finally solved it." "Nice work, rockstar!" do feel very competitive internally.

Also as someone with lots of anxiety (which I feel is somewhat common among developers) it really helps to hear that taking reasonable hours or a vacation is not only allowed, but encouraged. I worked at a place that switched to "unlimited vacation", but the process for getting it approved was so stressful that the majority of the developers didn't take a vacation that year.

At the same time if they're willing to do 60 hours a week of work (not if it takes them 60 hours to do 40 hours worth of work) they should probably be pointed out positively in the team meeting for putting the effort in, and privately told that it's probably not maintainable in the long term, and if they need to work that much to meet their objectives they have too much work.

But I don't see anything wrong with praising more output under the right circumstances. Everything ebbs and flows. As an IC there are times I go 3-4 days without a single commit. And there are times I have commits for 12 days straight because I'm on a roll.

I've been fighting for an "unlimited with minimum" vacation policy for the developers at my current job for a while now. It was fight to get the base increased from 2 weeks to 3, and the system doesn't allow negative PTO balances, which seems kind of draconian to me. But I'd love to see my coworkers taking 4-5 weeks a year.

So glad I live in a country with sane labor laws. We have mandated 4 weeks vacation, most places have 5 weeks. The law actually says that the employee is mandated to take 4 weeks vacation and the employer is mandated to make sure the employee takes their vacation. It's possible to "transfer" vacation days from one year to the next, but most people take their vacation every year. Looking forward to July off.

As someone with a tendency to accidentally work 60 hour weeks sometimes because I genuinely enjoy the work, I think you have to balance any praise with very clear expectations for the rest of the team. Something like "40 hour weeks are meant to be the norm and while heroism is appreciated, it is not sustainable".

Yeah, this reminds me of when I first got out of college: I worked at a small company and I never took vacations. After a couple years of never taking a vacation day, the owner started 'forcing' me to take vacations by paying for hotel and airfare to anywhere I wanted.