from Hacker News

The Dangerous Allure of the 70-Hour Workweek (2006)

by htatche on 5/10/21, 2:41 PM with 9 comments

• by commandlinefan on 5/10/21, 6:09 PM

  I'm always just a little skeptical when somebody says they're "working all the time" and then mentions a packed travel schedule. It's possible that they're spending all of that time in airports and on airplanes working, but it's just as possible that they're spending it watching movies or reading novels, too.

• by magneticnorth on 5/10/21, 5:33 PM

  Interesting to see this posted now. I only have anecdata, but it seems like the past year of eternal wfh has left a lot of people burned out and quitting or reducing hours.

  Very much the opposite of this view from 15 years ago of people who were energized by long work weeks and lots of time spent traveling for work and in offices.

• by ActorNightly on 5/10/21, 9:08 PM

  I would honestly do 70 hour work weeks as long as it was in software (which I enjoy anyways), and I got paid appropriately for extra time and had a month of vacation time.

  I would bank money/pay off mortgage agressivley, and then as I got older I would just quit and work part time or do contract work, not having any major financial obligations and plenty of money in reserves

• by proc0 on 5/10/21, 4:28 PM

  Remember Q&A positions? What happened to developing software and handing it off to someone that has good testing skills, whether it's manual testing or writing automated tests. If I'm not mistaken, the majority of software eng./dev. positions will now require you to do a lot of testing with the help of other engineers/developers, and this basically shifted the Q&A responsibilities over to the people who used to only solve the problem. Of course this has a huge impact on how many hours a week you need to work.

  Now I'm feeling like there are even more responsibilities being tacked unto engineers and developers, where effectively, we are arriving at two main roles in software companies: Technologists, and Managers. Of course everyone is going to have to work more hours because everyone has more roles to take care of.

  At least the software industry has been consolidating roles, and from my experience I have gone from developing, to developing, testing, managing people, communicating goals, doing presentations, and much more, when all I want to specialize in is problem solving for code. If we still had specialty roles, there would be a lot less weight on people's shoulders and they could optimize their role to a comfortable spot where they are not overworking so much.