On a personal level, the solution is to not work at this place. If that's an option. Some sort of organizing (like the U word) could help create leverage against abusive employers.
Consider that the 5 day work week is a relatively recent thing. Not too long ago everyone worked 7 days a week. The world didn't stop spinning when most people shifted to actually working 5 days a week with normal hours.
In Canada there is an endless supply of tech jobs that are 5 days a week and 8 hours per day. I am a hiring manager in a company where we care about our employees and pay them well and I can't find enough people. Partly because people prefer to work at places with a terrible work environment for various reasons (looks better on the resume, bragging rights, our work maybe isn't as exciting ...).
https://www.pbs.org/livelyhood/workday/weekend/8hourday.html
"In 1890, when the government first tracked workers' hours, the average workweek for full-time manufacturing employees was 100 hours and 102 hours for building tradesmen."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time "Before collective bargaining and worker protection laws, there was a financial incentive for a company to maximize the return on expensive machinery by having long hours. Records indicate that work schedules as long as twelve to sixteen hours per day, six to seven days per week were practiced in some industrial sites" (citation needed though)
- Don't have insane deadlines
- have enough people
- have better management
- forbid changes after the project plan has been approved.
I have worked in one company that worked like that, or perhaps it was just one factory in that company. It works at least some of the time, or at least it did at that time (late 70s to early 80s) and place Mullard, Southampton.
A lot of people like the idea of flexibility along with these reduced hours, but I'd actually prefer if we went to a uniform 3-day weekend with Friday off. This would have the benefit of aligning the definition of the weekend in the middle East with that in Europe and the US.
My next job was as an FTE at another very early stage startup, where we were constantly working and in the office 6 days a week, with some all-nighters before demos etc.
I was vastly more productive during the 4 day week period.
One of the biggest perks of moving to wfh for me has been the ability to do random household chores on breaks from work during the week and now actually have weekends for relaxing instead of things like laundry and grocery shopping.
In the article, it mentions that Microsoft saw a 40% increase in productivity by allowing looser schedules, so perhaps programmers solve problems faster when they aren't staying awake 48 hours a stretch drinking Jolt* and eating pizza three meals a day?
* dated myself
Guess everyone will have to work on adtech, surveillance and engagement-at-all-costs so they can all have 4-day-weeks and still make 5 times the national average.