What happens when every company is doing this ritual?
I'm starting to notice a very bad trend. Just like how LA has record numbers of homeless people, it also has a high vacancy rate.
Similarly, despite plenty of "open positions", candidates are being denied left right and center, even as they do their best to signal that they will do anything for the job.
> What happens when every company is doing this ritual?
Just look at Japan to see what a 12+ hour / day work culture looks like. Their population and their economy are both slowly going down the shitter thanks to it, depression is widespread, etc.
Working long hours is common in Asia, especially in Japan and Korea. My wife had worked as salaried accountant at Nike, Gap, Guess fashion, and other companies that have presence in Asia, and it was common for her to have to stay at work until 11pm, sometimes past midnight, and yet expected to report by 9am the next morning. Leaving work at 9pm would be ordinary, and leaving at 6pm would be like committing a career suicide. I have a friend who worked at Samsung in Korea and told me that the work hours were brutally long, but no one wanted to change jobs because the alternative was another job with less pay but still with long hours, as expected.
> Not sure if economic problems really come from long work days.
I'm not sure either, but, at least as the story is told today, that was Ford's motivation for implementing the 8 hour workday at Ford. He allegedly surmised that if people were too busy working, they wouldn't have time to buy his products. It certainly seems plausible. If you spend all your time working, you really don't need to buy much other than the basic necessities, which doesn't help with a robust economy.
Some businesses are run in sprint mode (not agile style sprint) and others are run in marathon mode. For those trying to build a lasting business with a consistent group of employees you can only run in marathon mode.
If you're looking for businesses who operate in marathon mode you may have to look outside SF/SV or NYC (those are the top 2 markets for long hours built into the economic model and high employee turnover). Once the economic model for an area is based on 50-70 hour weeks then it gets baked into pay, baked into cost of living, etc. This is certainly a longer topic than I have time to comment on right now fully.
I live and work in NYC and several of the companies I've worked for have never required more than 40 hours a week for work. In fact, if you did work long hours they would give you a day off or let you take extra vacation time like say taking a month long vacation to make up for it. You run someone into the ground then that person has health issues or leaves. Tech companies in NYC are very good about not having people work overtime. Even some older companies I've worked at like NYT and Reuters have great time off policies. I know for awhile Reuters had work from home Fridays.
All their business knowledge goes out the door with them. You end up wasting time with the hiring process and then finally hiring someone who costs more money who doesn't understand your business at all and won't be really able to contribute at a high level for 6 months while getting up to speed.
Every company will not follow this ritual. Despite what some folks think, not every technology is run by 20-30 somethings without families. I know quite a few engineers in my city, and I've never heard any one of them say they are compelled to work more than 40 hours a week[0]. This includes engineers at at several "household name" companies.
Yes, some companies have poor management, but these companies are also not exclusively tech companies.
[0] Yes, sometimes we all work a bit of overtime because of issues in the field, or one poorly run iteration. These things happen. The critical thing is how management works to avoid those situations in the future.
If the underlying hypothesis that overworked developers are bad developers is true (and I believe it is), then it should be a competitive advantage to not overwork your developers.
Hours worked is easy to measure, good/bad developers, quality of code -- not so much.
Doing deep/meaningful work for 70hours a week is reserved for genetic freaks -- 0.1% of the cases -- the rest are either the sub-mediocre bureaucrat types who want the office face time in order to climb the corporate ladder or the victims of the said bureaucrats who are guilt tripped into doing it.
What happens when every company is doing this ritual?
I'm starting to notice a very bad trend. Just like how LA has record numbers of homeless people, it also has a high vacancy rate.
Similarly, despite plenty of "open positions", candidates are being denied left right and center, even as they do their best to signal that they will do anything for the job.