There’s no glory in overworking, it’s just imminent burnout
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On high-functioning teams with half-way decent product management I've never once experienced a need for consistent, unrelenting "overworking".
My advice to anyone who finds themselves in a situation of constant overworking is to step back, realize that this is only happening because one or more people are in way over their head (could be anyone from ICs up to Execs), and try to figure out who it is. If it's you (even if you're CEO or CTO), then you'd do literally everybody (including yourself) a huge favor by finding a way to extricate yourself from the situation and figure out a more suitable set of responsibilities that you can execute on in a timely and predictable manner.
It's not easy to be that introspective and honest with oneself and one's peers about the team dynamic, but if that kind of meta-analysis can be adopted and exercised, then you'll end up enjoying your work a whole lot more.
Now not so much, but still get enthused about things from time to time and find myself still at work at 8:00pm not even aware of what time it is.
But that kind of work is elective, and is essentially a hybrid of hobby and duty, so I'm not convinced it fits the typical mold of a path to inevitable burnout.
I've done a whole lot more for periods of course but pay for it later and can't keep pace week after week without it really taking a toll. My mental state and relationships and personal life suffer. I become generally unhappy. Not to mention my hands and wrists. Burnout is the end and I've discovered in sum it's a loss to push more.
If more is expected over time I see it as a company that has no problem eating it's capital and it isn't for me. Other people might be tougher, IDK. But all I can keep is a solid 30-35 hours over the long haul without burning out.
First of all, some startups foster a cult-like, work-together-play-together environment where the pressure to overwork is subtly amped up as well since everyone spends all their time together. This kind of company is arguably exploiting young people's natural disposition and projected fantasies of success, although if they pay well and give above average equity then it could be more of a lifestyle choice than outright exploitation. It's also worth acknowledging that this kind of devotion can be a strong motivator that leads to high productivity. It's not necessarily the case that people have to work more because of mismanagement.
The second angle is that business success has very little correlation to the efficiency of management. Fundamentally if you have a good business then you will make more money for less work than if you have a bad one. Having obsessed workaholic employees is a decent way to improve your chances, but it's no guarantee. Sometimes in a startup you have to do a death march to survive long enough to test a reasonable hypothesis, but if it becomes so ingrained in the culture that you're still doing it at a later stage, then that's a company I won't touch with a ten foot pole.
It's my experience, and I suspect it's a larger phenomenon, that every company thinks it's giving out above average or at least "competitive" compensation.
However, if you're not in the management tier, and you don't have reason to believe management will get any better at hiring and aligning people, and you subsequently end up being in way over your head (even though the situation is ultimately someone else's originating problem). You're not helping yourself or anybody else by just sticking with the situation and pointing the finger upward. If you extricate yourself from it, then you get to give a useful signal to the hiring manager that they didn't do a very good job hiring, and you get to find a hiring manager who is good at hiring.
Someone somewhere up the chain overpromises on something without consulting the people that will do the work. Then the team is forced to burn the midnight oil to do that, because they are a talented group, who like the work and don't want the company to look bad, they manage to actually hit the date or miss it just by a little bit, by working themselves nearly to death.
Management, who thought the date would never be hit, based on the engineer complaints at the outset, is effusive in their praise for the team, buys them lunch or some other banal expression of thanks/recognition for their sacrifice, and now feeling justified in their estimation "skills" because they were bailed out by the engineers, proceed to do it again, and again ... after behaving for a little bit, or letting the engineers set dates for less important projects.
The usual response is "Well, we couldn't afford to do that!". Which means "our business model depends on our employees shouldering some of our costs" if you think about it.
"Clarity struck me at a management meeting when a colleague asked my opinion on a project. I shrugged lightly and said it didn’t matter to me, my team would be able to support whatever decision that was made. It was a somber, sobering realization: I didn’t care."
Now maybe this was one of those internal realizations, which is totally legit. But not having an opinion is okay too. I almost feel like part of the friction in tech is that everyone must always have a strong opinion all the time, even when it is unrelated to their work. Overall, I wish I had more times where people said "either of those sound fine, they both get the job done." Usually people who are "passionate" are actually prescribing details they have little insight into, vs the person who's doing the actual work / designing.
https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/LEVEL-Studios-Reviews-E235...
80 hour weeks for a year if I get paid 1 million dollars? Hell yeah. "Monk Mode" all the way.
If you're changing to a more lucrative career or trying to make a dent at a company, you'll probably need to do more than what's expected of you. (How else can you demonstrate that you're capable of doing your job AND the job of the role above you?) If you're working somewhere where long hours are practically institutionalized (investment banking, legal, etc), then you've gotta put in the time.
But balance is key. Take days/weeks off every so often. Make sure that the work is 100% aligned with your goals. Make sure that you HAVE goals and are keeping track so you can look back and see progress."
PhD is a whole different story because cut-throat competition, the 996 work habits, and oppressive Confucius culture are hallmarks of the student's native lands.
tldr;
Doctors are like frat boys while PhD students bring the cultural norms from their home countries.
There were discussions about that in the past, but I don't recall any of them having made the connection that it being brought back up in this context provided me...
Probably as a result of this, the navy's postgraduate school has a large sleep study niche for people getting their master's degrees. I haven't read the theses, but they might be worth a look. Here's the search portal: http://calhoun.nps.edu/handle/10945/17
Searching 'sleep' yields a 106-page list of theses.
It could be that an exodus of employees is what triggers actual reform.
And what if family stuff occurs like work?
I worked 90 hour weeks sometimes in grad school. But otherwise, only when I've billed by the hour.
Last year, around this time of the year, I read "Tantra Illuminated", which changed how I view work (and overwork), and play. Tantra is not really that accessible to most people though, and it takes a long time to explain.
This year, personal crisis led me to the book, "The Trickster, Magician, and Grieving Man". Unlike "Tantra Illuminated", the book is very accessible, though it might evoke significant emotional resistance in men who attempt to read it. The book is a critique on the normative archetype of masculinity, and has a powerful way of explaining why overworking and burnout is appealing.
The book starts with the first chapter on the shadow archetype of unacknowledged pain. The rest of the first half of the book explains the consequences of the unacknowledged pain, with the latter half of the book explaining three additional masculine archetypes. Although the book covers a lot of ground, I'll narrow it down to just overworking and burnout.
Pain is the experience of something in the world imposing on your sense of self. The normative masculine archetypes is such that, we try to chose our pain (by being a hero). The reality is that we cannot control and master all that we see. Each of us is connected in a complex intertwining of relationships, both physically and emotionally. In order to achieve the perceived ideal of being untouched, and untransformed, the classical male archetypes tends towards deadening ourselves towards pain and cut ourselves off from the connections that pain is signaling to us. That pain doesn't really go away, and instead, accumulates as a rejected shadow-side of our psyche.
One of the things that happens after that is to the taking on of the burden of the world as a proxy. The strain of upholding something is substituted for becoming present to the pain we carry. It brings with it thrill, the exhilaration. We tell ourselves narratives such as, "I am doing this for you", but it is just another way of avoiding the pain.
Taking this to its extreme leads to violence and war, drawing in others into the maelstrom of rage in a fit to avoid that pain.
Burnout happens when you can no longer avoid the pain. It looks like external stress, but what it really is, is the accumulation of unacknowledged pain of living. It's not something you can move past (which was what led to that accumulation in the first time). Being present to that pain, and just letting it be, letting it speak, letting it unfold in its own time is the only way to recovery.
This whole thing goes deeper than that if you want to avoid the cycles of overworking and burnout.