There are plenty of companies that try to get their employees to work those kind of hours. And, developers being as they are, there are certainly several who d

There are plenty of companies that try to get their employees to work those kind of hours. And, developers being as they are, there are certainly several who do in fact see that many hours/week. But really, in order for it to happen, the developers need to allow themselves to be walked over. Sadly, "being walked over" is a common skill in your average dev, while "not being walked over" is rare. All it takes is one guy to stand up for the team though, and sanity will prevail. I've been that guy on occasion. Developer Employee #1 at a newly funded startup, I sat in a meeting the first week where the CTO laid out a rough timeline and the CEO said something along the lines of "these are 60 hour weeks we're talking about, right?". Amazingly, the CTO didn't immediately say "of course not". So I did. To my knowledge, no developer ever worked more than 40 hours in a single week while I was there.