How do you make programmers work 60-80 hours per week?

Quora is so awful. Can't see anything about who has asked the question. I really hate that site. (Stack Exchange forever!) That said, that question did get a lot of answers...

But the nerve of some people... Why don't they just hire twice as many developers? (Assuming their sweatshop startup could handle it) And paying attention to Fred Brooks at the same time...

You don't make programmers work 60-80 hours [1].

It is possible, though, to find people who will work much more than 40 hours a week on their own if you let them, but that is rare and I'm not aware of any way to actually find these people.

I suspect that such people are less common now than they used to be, because of the internet, open source, and the generally greater availability and affordability of technology.

I was one of those people back around 1990. I was interested in firmware and embedded real time multitasking kernels, and found a job where I got to basically play around with whatever interested me in these areas. Several times my boss (who was also a close friend from college) had to force me to leave the office and take a break, because I wanted to keep coding, or keep writing the engineering part of the proposal for the next project we wanted to bid on, and he was worried because I'd been at it already for 20 hours straight that session. And yes, I was productive during these long hours. Over the course of most projects, I averaged several hundred lines a day of debugged, tested C code.

I believe that there are plenty of programmers today who put as much time and effort into technical things today as I did back then...but instead of it being 60-80 hours for the employer, it is 40 hours for the employer and the rest at home for the programmer's hobbies.

In 1990, to do the things I was interested in you generally needed to find a job involving them. Nowadays, you can get one of the numerous inexpensive cheap SOC computers (Arduino, Raspberry Pi, TI LaunchPad, and many more) and high quality complete free tool chains, and do all that at home on a small budget.

Basically, in 1990 doing nerd things in a big way generally required getting a job doing those things. Nowadays, you can do nerd things in a big way as a hobby. So someone who wants to spend 60-80 hours a week on nerd stuff no longer has to find an employer that will let them do it...they can spend 40 hours at their job, and then 20-40 at home on their own.

[1] You can make them spend that time at the office, doing things that look like work, but generally you won't get any more net useful work out of them than if you had just had normal work hours.

Easy: Get Congress to pass legislation that makes a "week" 14 days long.

Basically, hire only programmers who aren't good enough to get a better job.

Have you ever wondered why the average job is 40 hours/wk?

That's because the quality of work an employees produces dramatically decreases working more than that. Over time an employee working 60+ Hours per week will become exhausted and drained physically and mentally. Which will make them lose passion, less focused and become very unhappy with their job.

40-50 hours give that individual enough time to complete reasonable tasks and still have a work life balance. Employees who have more time to spend with family, friends and on their hobbies have shown to produce higher quality work and are more committed to their jobs.

You also shouldn't be worried about how long an employee works but how well they work.

Like the saying goes "Quality over Quantity"

While this should never be the goal, it's really easy to convince me to do this. Give me an impossible problem and the agency and support I need to accomplish it. And finally, actually reward me for success.

Give me a project of busy work or "connecting lego" as we call it, and you'll be lucky if you get that 2-4 hours the responder is referring to.

well, you can reintroduce slavery...