Over long periods of time, I’d prefer my very valuable engineers and product leads limit their work to 20 hours of the deepest possible thinking and work they can do per week (maybe in 4 or 5 4-5 hour chunks) and then stop, attend to the inevitable non-product, shallow-thinking-OK busywork that also comes with a company or large team structure.

I believe I’ll get more out of teams and individuals working in that model than I will from teams grinding out 60 hours a week of keyboard pounding with hands and foreheads.

My job as an engineering leader is not to get that 20 hours of focused work up to 30. It’s to get the busywork from 20 (or 30!) down to 12 so my teams can crush it while working only 32 hours per week.