This idea that everyone is "going home at 5:30" sounds like a misnomer here, if you're heading straight home at a reasonable time only to log in remotely as soon as you're done dinner. Is this really a policy significantly different than any other given company? Or is it solely because he's a "super-successful exec" that he does extra hours?
So if you're working over 6 hours/day, you are most probably wasting your employer's time and your own life. Infrequent longer streches of work are a different thing, of course, they work, but they need to be countered by vacation time which brings the average to about 5-6 hours /day anyway.
May be, but nearly every successful person I know falls into two basic categories.
1. Either cheats/is-lucky, is active in corporate politics and can get job done because of being in the circle of a higher manager's yes men. Gets out of turn opportunities etc. Or in short your usual cheating.
2. Works very hard, gets stuff done. Solves problems which people want. Makes it rain and takes the rewards back home at the end of the day.
I haven't seen any exceptions to these scenarios.
You can point factory assembly era type studies, where incentives for both succeeding and failing are none. The rewards are very linear to efforts. And you get only incremental hourly income for more effort. Obviously in such cases productivity will fall with extra working hours. Because motivation falls, the person begins to associate working extra with slavery and being paid bones for slogging to make somebody else rich.
But if the reward and work relationship is non-linear. And you get good enough money for taking a risks and working real hard. The motivation peaks and corresponding work done and profit from that rise.
OK, lesson time. There are people who make corporate social climbing a full-time job. Their code (if there is any) isn't great. They don't have real software accomplishments. Yet they rise. It has nothing to do with what they build, because they don't build anything. They take a lot of credit and endure (or call) a lot of meetings. That's a fundamentally different game from building software.
2. Works very hard, gets stuff done. Solves problems which people want. Makes it rain and takes the rewards back home at the end of the day.
You don't have to work 70-hour weeks to make things that people want.
Many thanks in advance!
I was thinking how can anyone cheat doing their job to become better? And then I remembered the guy who outsourced his job to China so that he could look at cat pictures all day, and came to be known as his company's best expert on many technologies. :)
Also it depends on type of work. Most people could work on CRUD websites for 16 hours a day. But some work require laser sharp concentration and drain daily energy in half hour.
And working tired is about as smart as driving drunk. What could possibly happen? :-)
For startup founders it's a bit different because there's variation in workload. Code isn't the only thing they do. They also have to meet with investors, manage people, set priorities, and network. With that additional variation, you can more easily get to a 70+ hour week and not burn out because even though you're pushing yourself to the limit of what most people can handle in terms of work and stress, you're doing different kinds of work. It's still exhausting, but it's less exhausting than doing the same kind of work for 70 hours.
Look, I enjoy the hell out of programming. It is a lot of fun. And I'm good at it. I've been doing it for long enough to know that I can't get 3,500 hours per year of quality code. There are people who claim to be different, but for every case of that where I've had the "privilege" of seeing his or her work, I've found that person not to be different.
Now, I have to say this bluntly: you're just wrong on one thing. The idea that you can't have real achievements without long hours is completely incorrect. With the right insights and exposure, you can. I'm not saying it's easy, and it typically comes only after several years of continuous hard work, but what's appealing about software is that often you can save a company millions with under a hundred hours of work. (Well, actually, that's because of the thousands of hours the person spent learning before that point, but the nice thing about programming is the acceleration of value creation. Once you learn more stuff, you get to a point where you can reliably add value to such degrees.)