“Hard work” in the context of phd studies is not measured in a number of hours one works per week. It’s measured in a number of first author publications in top journals/conferences.
Let’s assume this is a CS PhD (so no “lab” work). Is this person doing 60 hours of actual research a week? If I did a PhD while working full time, I would expect to do purely research. I’m not interested in teaching or grading papers or anything non-dissertation related.
Btw, this is how most people do their PhDs here. It’s a quick in and out 3 year seal-team like operation. Caveat: We see Ph.D as a degree you do after a 2 year Masters degree. So in total 5 years after undergrad.
When I was in grad school (Econ, not CS) teaching, etc., was less than 10h a week. The rest of the time was research. So yeah, 60+ hours of actual research a week.
That seems... excessive? 60 hours a week / 5 days a week is 12 hours a day. Even working Saturdays, that would give you 10 hours a day 6 days a week. I personally have never met any single PhD student who did that amount of pure research each week for 5 or 6 years. Again, I'm not talking about "lab" type research.
