80 hours a week is the equivalent of 8am to 10pm six days a week. That sounds completely unrealistic. Either the work is trivial, you're destroying your health, or you're over estimating the time you're actually spending.
I did 80+ hours as well when I was just writing code and managing servers; about 40/60 respectively. It was more than 80 hours and I missed things, but I was young and made up for it. I would not want to do that again either.
> six days a week.
Anecdotally when I was doing that much work, it was 7 days a week. When I woke in the morning my phone was full of emails slack pings and build issues, and it was closer to midnight when it stopped than 10pm. There is no down time whatsoever in an environment like that, everyone is constantly stressed and overworked and it just makes it worse
Agreed.
> Why do it though?
It was a boiling frog situation. When I joined, things were good. 35-40 hour weeks, interesting work, great coworkers. The team grew, and all of a sudden I was a knowledge holder in areas. It started with an occasional message from a co worker who had a deadline, and then the deadlines were every 2 weeks, and it wasn't just one coworker, it was multiple coworkers. Then it was other people working late nights and me replying on saturday mornings to their issues because I wasn't really working, it was just a slack message. Then it was me fixing issues on a sunday morning because it was the only time my mailbox wasn't bursting. Around that point I realised what was happening, so I scaled things back to working hours, and started getting negative feedback and comments about "not trying as hard as others" from other managers (not my manager though). My annual review came back as negative because other teams were reliant on me being available, so i went back to being always on for about a year before I got another offer and left on good terms.
It genuinely took me about a year afterwards to realise how bad things had gotten (everyone checks their work email precautionarily at 11pm on a saturday night so they can sleep without worrying, right? That's normal.) I'm much better off now.
I am not entirely sure what is wrong with them. Only one case can be attributed to money. The rest looks like a weird psychological addiction.
If you are good at coding, then you code for a day and create something you are proud of. +1 to self worth.
You send it for code review or deploy and you get positive feedback. +2 to self worth.
A junior dev in house or browsing your open source project loves your code and asks for advice. +3 to self worth.
Compared to.
Go out to a social event for lunch, struggle through the social interactions.
Maybe drink a bit too much because you are stressed.
Get caught in a difficult spot when you tell someone they are wrong (which they were, but you were being rude).
Hang around for the whole afternoon / evening because you told yourself you have to make this work and get a life.
End your day without any self worth reward and struggle the next day due to the alcohol or paranoia of reliving the previous day.
This is the life of a few socially awkward (and usually high iq) people I have had the pleasure of meeting. And myself.
I think it is healthy to take the second option, get a life, learn to make relationships.
But it’s the hard option. Sitting at the IDE and being good at what you are good at, is much easier.
There are definitely ways to mitigate this way of thinking, one being understanding the "spot light effect" the "phenomenon where people tend to overestimate how much others notice aspects of one's appearance or behavior."
Also to do more structured based social activities.