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I've worked at startups doing 80 hours a week, and currently keep myself strictly under 50 and I really haven't seen much of a difference in the amount of code

by 49531 11y ago

I've worked at startups doing 80 hours a week, and currently keep myself strictly under 50 and I really haven't seen much of a difference in the amount of code I am able to ship. Something about the feeling of having all the time in the world made me less focused I guess. When I have a deadline, and know that I won't be working through the weekend, I tend to still get it done on time. Also, in my experience. The teams that work 40-50 hours/week seem to be more stable and of a higher caliber than the 70-80 hours per week crowd, but that's just from the 3-4 teams I've been a part of. I wouldn't say it's anything conclusive.

HillRat 11y ago
I've never seen a 60+ programmer workweek schedule that didn't start generating negative productivity through reduced quality, technical debt and poor design choices. In part, this is because high workloads are symptomatic of poor project planning, but it's also because overworked programmers make poor choices. Conversely, I've worked with companies that produced amazing, very high profile work under ridiculous deadlines and still got everyone out of the office by six. Obviously, limited crunch periods are unavoidable, but if your project plan assumes more than six to seven hours of productivity a day you're probably creating an unsustainable workload.