In my experience, the length of the working day is usually a red herring. Over-engineering & over-complexity is usually the problem that slows the launch of a p

In my experience, the length of the working day is usually a red herring. Over-engineering & over-complexity is usually the problem that slows the launch of a product. (as well as good old-fashioned bad planning, bad management and unrealistic expectations) * Too little pressure and flexible deadlines lead to over-engineering and feature creep. * Too much pressure and unrealistic deadlines leads to bug-ridden, throw-away spaghetti code. * A realistic deadline with a small amount of pressure leads to better design decisions and just-engineered-enough code. Combining over-complexity with long hours towards the end of a release is normally a recipe for disaster. Projects that have too little pressure at the beginning are often the ones that end up with too much pressure towards the end as unfinished, superbly flexible, elegant code is shoe-horned into the one imperfect small use case it was built for (while twenty other features, that were pushed aside for it, languish unimplemented).