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This is bunk. You're paid to do work which can be done in 40 hours/wk or you're being exploited (and so are a lot of other people). When you're 60 would you rather have memories with your kids, or have the satisfaction of writing lots of code in the 2010s that is not being used anymore because it got obsolete/automated? (don't believe that can happen? Talk to rule-based AI researchers from the 80s)

The only reasons to do long hours are because a) you need a temporary career boost, and b) you're Batman and the world depends on you.

Just because there is a possibility that my work could be made obsolete, I can't stop working. That is a non-starter. Why do you think people keep working on various fields like physics when most of them are theories that might be disproved very soon?

You are also forgetting the reason where you want to address the engineering need in you: Some of us have fun making this. Believe it or not, We want to do this :)

I do have other time that I spend with my family etc. More or less is personal preference. Family is one of those things that one can sink in infinite time and still feel incomplete - we all strike balances. FWIW - I sleep only 6 hours or so, so it provides a bit of a leg up. I usually nap a bit on the weekends though.

My meta-point is: Some people look at a job as a means to make a living. I look at mine as an opportunity. Here I have a company that is willing to put millions of dollars in the direction I point at or into the work that I am doing, based purely on trust. This kind of scale / experience is impossible to get by myself. For this I have to go the extra mile. The end result might benefit the company, but I find joy in the process of creation.

The company is not exactly chintzy either. They compensate me well enough to keep that from becoming an issue to me or my family.

I would add that a lot of employers (and I suppose that also VCs, but I haven't had the experience first hand) love to try to make you think you're Batman, in order to trick you into long hours.

How often does that work? Doesn't it become obvious that you aren't one after the first deathmarch?

" It is VERY hard to hire good senior engineers. My company (Amazon) pays a ton of money, has offices in great cities but still we find hiring hard."

Why?

Can you positively exclude the influence of the known long-hour culture?

I have only a very small data set: myself.

Amazon tried to recruit me (I have almost 30 years experience, much of it as team lead). However, when I found out about the corporate "death march" culture, I decided not to pursue it. My annual salary would go up, but my hourly compensation would go down.

It might not matter to your wife and kids, but it matters to mine.

Otherwise, the work there did in fact sound pretty interesting, but the opportunity cost was too high.

Different strokes for different people I guess :). I respect your choice.

>Why?

1. Because we are in a super competitive market. The talent pool at the top end is VERY contested and for every offer from one of FB/GOOG/AMZN/TWTR/MS there is a competing bigger offer elsewhere.

2. The top end doesn't usually move for things like money/perks. They feel ownership to the thing they are building meaning they move only when they are super pissed or are at a logical endpoint. They might also have familial ties to their locale by now.

3. Also even if you move as a super senior engineer, you will have to go through the age old cycle of convincing EVERYONE in the new company that you are worth your salt etc. else you won't garner much respect. This is way harder in these smarter teams.

That's off the top of my head.

>Can you positively exclude the influence of the known long-hour culture?

I think so. Most of the high-achievers seem to not care about this. These are people who ride on the high of solving complex issues and they need the repeated hits.

Feel ownership ? Do you mean that you receive shares immediately when you join?

:)

I meant ownership in terms of features / products. The money becomes a non-issue after a point.

To answer your specific question: Yes. You do receive shares / sign-on bonuses and these amount to be very big. But they usually have a vesting period though.

Google for example would still be profitable it paid everyone including secritary's 500,000$ a year. So no companies stick with a market rate well below what a top engineer's output is actually worth.

Shouldn't point 1 be the inverse?

If you are working with a group of people that are considered "super smart", and you are in that group, well, regardless of what you say, the inclusion in the group makes you also "super smart". So, in fact you should be working even less than 40 hours and get much much more done than the "average" group.

It almost seems like Amazon culture foster's this attitude of "we hire really smart people, if you can't keep up, you need to work harder." This might make sense if one or two people in the group were doing the long hours but when its the whole group, well, I would suggest that the company has done a great job of selling the kool-aid.

Amazon doesn't foist a 'keep up' requirement on people. You can just do your job, make a bunch of money and have fun working here for a long time. There might be a little bit more work compared to other companies that build packaged software, but nothing the web companies don't have.

And no - I was not saying the team does long hours either. We have all mixes of people, some do long hours and some wrap it at 40 or 45 max. I was only justifying why some might do long hours.

Any super-smart group with good camaraderie gets a bunch of work done. But if you want to distinguish yourself in that group, you are going to have to put in extra. There is also the pesky part about differing experiences / knowledge bases. It takes extra to tap into all that as well. All of that add up.

Thanks for the update. It helps remove some assumptions.

The OP does mention that long hours are not sustainable which recognizes that occasional bursts of extra effort will get results. As for point number 5, nobody said that people should go home and sleep at the end of their 8 hour day. If you have a hobby that is completely different from your day job, then it will energize you, as you have discovered. Your day job is management and your hobby is coding.

Most of my hobbies are related to my product - so no issues there. But even in the main project, there are some issues that require the personal attention of senior engineers. These will require time aside from the regular co-ordination / mentoring.

Also I don't manage people. Just projects - a Technical lead so to say.