The poor dumb author. Sounds like both of the conflicting work setups he's torn between are terrible. 1. Silicon valley style enforced fun. eg lol we're crazy

The poor dumb author. Sounds like both of the conflicting work setups he's torn between are terrible. 1. Silicon valley style enforced fun. eg lol we're crazy here look we have a ping pong table. Its hard to get anything done in these places, constant distractions, meetings, open plan etc. + I'd be happier if they just payed me the money they wasted on frivolous crap, cus getting paid is absolutely the main reason I show up to work on your thing, and not just work on my thing. 2. Putting in the hours. As a programmer I personally reckon I have c. 4 hours per day of really really high quality focused work in me (depending on the day) Forcing myself to code when I am not in the zone would just result in worse code, more bugs, more regressions, more work to do later. I would lose time overall and have a worse product. (Aside from the effect of just the longer hours) it would also hurt my motivation as the codebase would begin to become nasty + a chore to work on. Ive found doing a reasonable amount of top quality work every day, and never crunching, is what gets stuff out the fastest.