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Pretty much this. A few years ago, I used to work for a small-ish American company that had offices in my corner of the world in Europe. They tried to pull this sort of crap in our office -- everyone except the guy in charge of the local office (who was a VP of something something -- his company had been bought some time before) quit within months. The occasional week-long sprint before a release is one thing. I think better management/planning would avoid them, but they're normal in such a competitive industry, I guess. So I've worked 80-hour weeks at times, no complaint here. In fact, I think they're healthy now and then, I like the buzz that I get at 3 AM, it's good concentration exercise... Constant work at this pace though, no, can't do. First, that's how bad software gets written. You literally get worse at your business for doing it. Second, those additional hours per day aren't just family time hours. They're also learning-new-things hours, reading hours, keeping myself informed hours, debating stuff with friends hours and so on. Not having them further decreases my chances of getting better employment somewhere else (or even getting a better position where I work right now) and slowly turns me into a social retard living in a bubble made out only of headlines. That can't be good for me. Oh, and without additional pay, it's illegal pretty much everywhere around here. It's probably like getting drunk -- getting shitfaced once a year with your old highschool friends to celebrate the anniversary of when you all got arrested for egging the principal's house is kind of a healthy social activity. Chugging a bottle of Jameson every day because that's how we do things around here is called being an alcoholic and it's really bad for your insides. I've had colleagues who glorified this sort of work. It does create some amount of peer pressure (unsurprisingly, the managers are quick to praise this sort of stuff), but after the ripe age of 17 I've learned to deal with that. |