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This is the way it is. Anyone who's worked in the industry (or any industry?) knows from experience that this is the way it is. I'm sure that there are data available.

A quick Googling for "productivity vs hours worked" led me to this:

http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2013/10/hours-worked-an...

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Unfortunately there are quite a few problems in the report: 1. it measures productivity by GDP, which itself is not a great measure 2. it compares Greece vs Germany, and fails to mention that they rely on completely different industries; Greek - agriculture, Germany - manufacturing

But what we are talking about here specifically is the software development industry, where quantity does not always mean quality. So herein lies the problem that potentially a lot of our beliefs that "more hours worked means diminished return" could just be based on bad data analysis.

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