[jogjayr]

The "IPO-ing will make me exceedingly wealthy" scenario is certainly one way to get an 60-80 hour work week.

The other is to be in a business that the employee is passionate about for intrinsic reasons. If the employee is a "true believer" in the company's mission, that can be a motivator to go above and beyond.

Using technology and/or techniques that the employee is interested in learning can be a useful driver. Someone who wants to learn machine learning, for instance, will put in the extra hours if they're given a chance to do it at work while working on a project. Granted it's not a way to get 80 hours from an expert in the field.

Another is to give an employee a great degree of freedom or responsibility in a particular role, and emphasize its importance to the company. Giving a programmer absolute technical authority over a critical project, with high visibility, can motivate them to go hell for leather for a few months.

Ultimately I think working 60-80 hour weeks over the long term, for any reason, will cause burnout. But you can get some short-term boosts if you align the employee's passions with your business needs.

[unholiness]

Yeah, I hear a lot of people saying essentially "40 hours is the most anyone can be productive for in a week". My more realistic rule of thumb is that people can tolerate maybe 20-30 hours of doing things they don't intrinsically care about.

So, if you give a shit about 20% of your job, and your job tolerates you doing personal stuff (slash miscellaneous browsing) for a few hours a week, then sure, 40 hours can be sustainable. On the other hand, if this job is your passion, work is stimulating, and you've got things you feel positive ownership over, then having 60-80 hour work weeks isn't necessarily unhealthy (so long as you're aware if and when those drives start to dwindle).

The other upshot of this theory is it dismantles argument that side projects hurt employees' productivity. The extra time spent pursuing your own passions simply isn't draining in the same way implementing others' ideas is. If anything, it adds motivation to the day-to-day stuff, knowing you'll learn skills at work that help the side project you really care about.

[gurkendoktor]

> The other is to be in a business that the employee is passionate about for intrinsic reasons. If the employee is a "true believer" in the company's mission, that can be a motivator to go above and beyond.

Some of us are also fiercely competitive. If I had the chance to compete with another company that (in my opinion) is full of idiots, I would probably work day and night to one-up them with my team.