I have never hired anyone, but anecdotally from a team lead dev who has hired a couple dozen people, that is the exact kind of thing they want to avoid.
If someone was a "star" working 90 hours a week in the past but now wants to work 40, they stop being the kind of "star" some companies want.
If coding consumes your paid and free time, you're generally not cranking out new CRUD features requested by the marketing team. You're doing pet projects, learning new languages, or getting lost in bikeshedding, like writing a new JS framework because you think the current list sucks.
That means your workaholic employee is burning out on things that don't help your company, and their actual paid work is probably a distraction from what they really want to be doing.
By contrast, someone experienced with a family and/or hobbies working 40h will often do their work well and have ways to detox from work problems before getting started again the next morning.
A lot of that is my anecdata, but hiring people who want work/life balance is working so well that those are the only devs I have (14 at the moment).
Fascinating. I think it was this early belief in the 90s and then the dotcom boom had the superstars and then the next wave had the next superstars and it shifted. Now it's shifted back. Wonder what shifted it.
Well, to my people out there, do not fret: there are still places to work where you work with other obsessives, there are still people who look for that in each other, and after 20 years of messing with computers I can tell you it is still joyful. You can do what you love and make a lot of money doing it. And in these places no one will judge you for loving the thing you work on so much you do it for fun as well.
I believe there are obsessive coders who will have lots of money/fun. Some will be valuable to their employers. No company should only look for these coders, which is the policy I was originally trying to refute.
It's much, much easier to find productive 40 hr coders than productive 80 hr coders. The ones coding for 80 hrs are often perfectionists, or they believe they're immune to burnout.
You yourself seem to believe that loving something enough means you can avoid burnout. You can't.
Burnout is part of our physiology. If you lose even small amounts of sleep for long periods of time, your performance falls off a cliff. What's worse is that you don't know you're not at your best.
Look at pro gamers. They love games enough to play them all day, every day, but they still suffer at the end of a long session.
Just about the only way I have seen people work this much and not be overly tired drag was when significant bulk of time was spent socializing and playing around. Otherwise said, it was not actually work, but it was clocked in as work.
And at this point, there is enough evidence that crunch is productive for few weeks and then productivity fails.
You would be surprised at what your mind can do if you want it to. I made the jump to tech from academia because while I was ready to do that insane work ethic I wasn't convinced that academia as it is today was worth it.
Turns out I can't just switch off this style of working though, and hence I end up working harder than I should. I'm not wasting my time though.
What I have observed though is when engineers who are in their twenties just Naturally go into an insane work ethic without mentoring on focus and time management typically waste their time. But it is possible to be 2-3x more efficient by increasing the hours you put in as long as you are smart about it. Many of the smartest people in the world do. Of course this should be a personal choice. 90 hours is a bit much though. 80 is probably the sustainable maximum for any normal human.
Not according to research. I know that academia features long hours. I never heard of academia as an example of efficiency through. Game industry is another hours high occupation (and the studies about crunch are from there).
Also, having kids after 40 is not exactly advisable for women. You are getting into risk category health vise.
People who work 80 hours a week and have children simply have spouse who does all childcare related work and career sacrifice (if they had career).
I'm not advocating it to anyone who hates this. I just want to say that I didn't mind it, I liked it as long as I was working on exciting things, and so did my professors and most other professors that I knew for that matter. My professors didn't have burnout or mental breakdowns, I didnt. Some of my labmates did though, and they quit.
I do not condone how my professors did things, they were abusive for sure. But that was fairly independent of the work ethic if you ask me. Most biology labs that went on to produce Nobel laureates or path breaking vaccines are similar.
Also please go revisit your literature on women having kids after 40. It's not nearly as bad as you might think it is.
How would you know?
I was too, from the age of 16 to about 26. Burnout doesn't always happen quickly.
In my case, I was able to work 80-100 hrs/wk for months at a time. Eventually I realized that my one-dimensional life wasn't getting any more work done.
Your brain needs to recharge, which can mean sleep, daydreaming, paying attention to the drone of exercise, socializing, watching TV, or any number of things.
I find the complaining of most engineers incoherent. Until March or so, more than at any point in time, being a competent software engineer opened doors at thousands of companies. I expect we'll be back there within two years tops.
When you are looking for a job, ask the person you're talking to what expectations are. Ask the hiring manager how he or she defines success for the role. Ask every employee you speak to how much they work. You'll get your answer. Pick your employer accordingly.
ps -- at my 40-ish person startup, eng rarely work more than 45h/week. And we have plenty of parents. We do however make comparatively boring software sold to enterprises, and have trouble hiring in part because of that (imo).