[blizkreeg]

Unless the project is the Apollo-11, I have never understood why 9-5 is not sufficient. That's 7 solid hours of work (1 hour for lunch). If pointless meetings consume a lot of that time, I get that may not be sufficient.

Personally, whenever I've put in 7-8 solid hours of coding and/or design/thinking, I'm spent for the day. Done. Over. I just want to give my brain a rest at that point. I don't think it's humanly possible to be working at peak capacity for anything before 10 hours a day. I wish modern workplaces focused more on how to create an environment/culture where employees are in "the zone" more often than just having them put in longer hours. That I believe would produce higher quality work.

This whole thing about expecting programmers to work beyond 9-6 is just sad. I have never once seen a Product Manager or Business Dev guy work late into the night.