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Comment by maerF0x0 | Hacker News Reader

> unwilling to run the same 60 hour gauntlet that a 25 year old _can_ etc.

Older people _can_ run 60 hour gauntlets. We're just wise enough to know that it leads to no good outcome.

"We're just wise enough to know that it leads to no good outcome."

I'm middle aged, working with some very young people right now, and I'm having an epiphany, because they are running around like chickens with their heads cut-toff, and I see there's no reason for it, they are equating 'sweat and crunch' with 'value' and making all sorts of mistakes. The epiphany is: they remind me exactly of me at that age!

And they won't take any advice. I mightn't have either ... though I did definitely respect my managers ... and they have none ...

These problems are particularly pernicious when the younger teams have no upper management, or have never worked in larger organizations.

Hopefully, we are starting to realize the value of older devs in some situations and can respect their abilities wherein they are valuable.

> though I did definitely respect my managers

Maybe you thought you were respecting them, but did they actually perceive it as respect? Or something else?

I was wild, but deferential to them.

They knew it.

I always took their direction.

That wisdom makes you of negative business value to your manager, since he still believes 60-hour gauntlets are an intrinsic part of being on time and under budget.

Hence, you won't get hired.

I'd be happy not to be hired by such a manager. Crunch time happens sometimes, and you gotta do what you gotta do. But 60 hour weeks as a matter of course are a dealbreaker for me.

They are a deal-breaker for me, too, at 35 as they were at 30.

I gotta get a giggle. Not that I'm mocking 60 hour work weeks, that's still a lot of hours no doubt. But whenever I read 60 hour work weeks as a big deal I just think back to my time as a chef. I think the max I capped out was 120 hours a week, and I did that for 5 weeks straight before contracting pneumonia due to a cold I got sometime within that period. Never again. Hell...10 hours of work per week is enough to discourage me these days heh.

More like, I won't "hire" him. Hiring is a two way street.

Always ask about how much overtime is expected from a job during interviews. If you don't believe in >40 hour work weeks, except maybe under rare conditions, then don't "hire" your prospective employer.

But once a recruiter has this type of experience with a few older candidates, they will be more likely to discount older candidates in the future, regardless of whether those later individuals were willing to do 60+ hour weeks or not.

Then that recruiter should schedule themselves for a rectal occipital extraction :)

At the risk of sounding like an apologist for ageism -- why?

There's no magic button you can push in your brain that says 'don't form conditional expectations based on protected categories'. If you're a recruiter and older candidates keep blowing you off, would you really continue to put in the same amount of effort to try to recruit them, even if you consciously attempted to?

I disagree. I have read articles like http://lifehacker.com/working-over-40-hours-a-week-makes-you... which claim that over 40 hrs a week on average, for average people, will have lower productivity. I get that sometimes people have to work over 40 hours a week, and then follow it with extended periods of rest. An example is tax accountants. But for continuous producers like executives or engineers imo they are more interested in volume of work completed in 1 year than fastest single week/month.

It does look like there are a lot of entrepreneurial and also some employment positions which are not suitable for average people, I agree.

Older people are more likely to have stable homes, relationships, expenses and goals. This can also translate into a "comfortable groove" of 60+ hour weeks that goes on indefinitely, simply because it's not a grueling ordeal.

I think it's a matter of degree. A two week crunch time every 6 months is OK, maybe even beneficial. Every month though? Not OK, and definitely detrimental.

> A two week crunch time every 6 months is OK, maybe even beneficial

Being overworked nearly 10% of the time is not "OK"

Depends how often you're underworked.

If people are overworked 10% and underworked 10% (or any other similar number) that's an "project management smell". I wouldn't want to work there.

Unless they offer tons of vacation. :-)

I think I dislike underworking as much as overworking.

"Your lack of planning does not translate into my crisis"

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