I don't know much about other industries. But in software, much of the 'long hours' seems like the result of keeping up appearances, not actual necessity. In my

I don't know much about other industries. But in software, much of the 'long hours' seems like the result of keeping up appearances, not actual necessity. In my office now, I am sitting here posting to Hacker News. My sysadmins are playing foosball. They'll probably then go get lunch for an hour. Then come back, read some websites for an hour. Punch out a couple tickets. Play foosball. Go to some meetings. Then around 6pm people will start freaking out and stay until 10 or 11 scrambling to get the work done they were supposed to do all day. In contrast, a startup I once worked for grew large enough to have an office in Germany. I went to work there one summer. The Germans simply didn't fuck around. They'd come in by like 8 am, crush the problems, crank out features and then go home. The Germans maybe weren't as "fun" as their US counterparts, but they were an order of magnitude more efficient. I don't know what it is, but Germans seem to have a cold, efficient "Terminator" relationship to work. Americans have a dramatic bi-polar relationship to work, where they waste a lot of time when they are working and then worry and complain about their jobs are when they are not working.