It takes a long time to become a truly awesome developer. And working more than 9-5 tends to burn people out over time. Which is why I suspect most of the top

It takes a long time to become a truly awesome developer. And working more than 9-5 tends to burn people out over time. Which is why I suspect most of the top programmers in the world are much closer to 9-5'er than most people on HN are willing to admit. PS: One of my favorite stories of such a person goes something like this. Coder X was fired after failing to get a 6 month project finished after a full year. Greg, took two 40 hour weeks to read the documentation and slap something together to keep the project from slipping, but made a simple mistake which ended up causing significant problems in production a few days later. After fixing the problem he asked the QA people why they put it into production that quickly while missing such a basic issue was not discovered. Their response, we stopped testing your code a few years ago and this is the first problem that's showed up. The most interesting part of this story is if Programmer X had got his code to work after say 11 month he would no have been fired. Which means the company would employ someone that's 3% as effective as this guy.