I find it sad how much our industry obsesses about working crazy-long hours. It's a hard thing to criticize, since I think most of us (myself included) have found ourselves passionately working on a project non-stop for extended periods of time, and found it fulfilling. But I worry about the mythologizing that happens where we take this behavior as a source of pride, either to make heroes of the famous programmers who locked themselves in their room for a week with Red Bull and pizza and, or use this as a status symbol to brag about how awesome a hacker we are.
Who am I to tell someone to stop working if they choose to do so? But I do worry that this just normalizes expectations by companies that every dev needs to be a rockstar ninja 10x hacker that lives and breathes code 24/7 and has no life outside the company.
I guess what I think is that when we see things like "working 80-hour weeks continually" we shouldn't be defaulting to "wow that's so impressive!" but rather "wow that's not healthy."
Who am I to tell someone to stop working if they choose to do so? But I do worry that this just normalizes expectations by companies that every dev needs to be a rockstar ninja 10x hacker that lives and breathes code 24/7 and has no life outside the company.
I guess what I think is that when we see things like "working 80-hour weeks continually" we shouldn't be defaulting to "wow that's so impressive!" but rather "wow that's not healthy."