> it's not admirable--it's sad

It's not just sad. It's often bullshit.

I don't believe for one second when people say "I worked 120-hour weeks for 6 months!" Simple math tells you this is a farce. Even 100-hour weeks is not sustainable, unless people want to claim they literally did nothing but wake-commute-work-lunch-work-commute-dinner-sleep for weeks on end. Not buying it.

Oh yeah this is absolutely true. I've voluntarily done ~100-hour weeks, and even in my 20s it destroyed me, I needed multiple weeks to recover from even short periods of intense "crunch".

The idea that you're living at the office and actually being productive is just laughable. It is absolutely not helpful except in brief emergency situations.

I've done 80-hour work weeks in blocks ranging from 6 weeks to 6 months. I did literally nothing but wake-work-sleep-wake-work-sleep, with time for food and similar necessities.

I didn't have many blocks like that, but those were some of the most productive (and personally fulfilling) times of my life. They made my career. Those allowed me to level up each time in a very significant way.

I also had long breaks after each of those -- they set me up to cruise for a while.

I did that before kids. I couldn't do that after kids. After kids, though, I have a depth of knowledge that makes me applicable for other types of productivity and work.

I have mostly worked at large companies, and in my experience this is due to the "business" people picking a deadline with no input from the people who actually have to make it happen.

If anything, that kind of behavior should give the outside world pause and raise questions about the sustainability of any product output.

That mattered less in the days of one artifact software development (and still matters less in areas like video games where that is the case), but software development these days is a process and many projects are far more marathon than sprint.

> If anything, that kind of behavior should give the outside world pause and raise questions about the sustainability of any product output.

It should give everybody pause, including software practitioners. A separate, but related pet-peeve is how these unsustainable heroics are often rewarded at work!! Boss: "Look at Chris over there--he stayed up until 4:30AM and fixed that ship-blocking bug. What a champ!" Chris gets a $1,000 spot bonus and now the rest of the team looks up to him as an example of good software development. Incredible but it happens almost everywhere!

For game developers/designers/artists, this does appear to be the case from what I can tell, but only because they are ruthlessly exploited. Otherwise it is indeed a ridiculous and pseudo-macho attitude that impresses nobody.

The quality of my code drops considerably if I don't take breaks or do something else for a couple of hours once in a while. Making up for it by coding even more sounds like a terrible idea.

Imagine you are running at 2 miles/hr and your competitor is doing 4 miles/hr. How much distance gap increases between two of you as time passes? The answer is secret to virtually all success in most companies which started as startup. In companies where people do 9-5 and competition where people sleep under desk, the gap grows tremendously. Yes, people burn out and they will be discarded and replaced with new blood but that’s how history is made, unfortunately. The 9-5 companies are exactly the target to be swept away by startups.

it depends on the video game. people have been playing diablo 2 for 20 years

No it does not depend, even if it was released few months later it would've made no difference.