[sdiupIGPWEfh]

What I've seen happen at other companies that state they value impact over effort, openly discouraging overtime, is that eventually certain individuals will attain higher impact by not recording their overtime, who then pressure others to do the same. No, no one is directly rewarded for overtime, but effectively, yes, undocumented overtime becomes the expectation from your peers. That is toxic.

[p1esk]

How do you know if there’s overtime involved? I’ve worked with people who could accomplish as much in two hours as I did in two days. Would it be “toxic” to work in such an environment?

[sdiupIGPWEfh]

If your colleagues are leveraging substantial undocumented overtime, you're going to find out eventually. If you know someone is in the office 40 hours a week and they submit massive pull requests first thing in the morning, even Monday mornings, for problems you know they hadn't solved or started the night or week before, you should suspect something's up. Sooner or later, if someone's breaking their neck, they will resent team members who aren't putting in the same effort, and they'll slip and admit to the amount of time they're putting in, directly or indirectly.

Granted, it's easier to hide this now when everyone's working from home.

> I’ve worked with people who could accomplish as much in two hours as I did in two days. Would it be “toxic” to work in such an environment?

No, why would that be toxic?

[p1esk]

Why does it matter to you whether your peers are more productive than you because they are smarter than you, or because they work more? Is the former OK, but the latter "toxic"?

[dreinhardt]

It matters because someone has to decide what A- and B-List performance means. And the performance ceiling will shift if people put in 60 hours constantly. They will get more stuff done (assuming all else being equal) and soon your 40 hour A-List performance will have degraded to B level and now you’re either pressured in also doing the unrecorded overtime to get as much stuff done, or you are fired (you’re B-List now since someone is beating your performance by around 33%).

[p1esk]

First of all, you can't assume "all else being equal". People are different, and this is especially true for star performers.

If I'm a manager and I notice someone is consistently underperforming (compared to his peers) - it does not matter if the rest of the team is working overtime, or is smarter, or more experienced - I don't care. I will ask the underperformer to step it up (again, don't care if this means working harder, or smarter), and if no improvement after a set period, I will be looking for a replacement. I'm paying top dollar for top performance.

This situation is normal and expected in professional sports. I don't remember hearing about "bad work/life balance", or "being pressured into doing overtime" in conversations about elite athletes' performance. Should we treat elite SWEs differently?

[sdiupIGPWEfh]

Remember, this is in the context of companies stating they value impact over effort, the sort of places that brag about their work/life balance. If I'm accepting an offer from such an employer and taking this into account during salary negotiations, I will be rightly pissed off to find out the standard is secretly 60-80 hours a week.

If they're open about expectations, assuming I'm at a point in my life where the trade-off makes sense, then if the compensation is good, that's fantastic. Nothing toxic about that. Not that different from some US manufacturing workers getting paid hourly wages, who make the same kind of trade-off all the time, making damn good money for 60 hours of peak performance a week. Sure, they might end up paying for it by ruining their bodies and drop dead from a heart attack or stroke within a year of retirement if they make it that long, but the risks are no secret.

> This situation is normal and expected in professional sports.

Let's google. The NFL seems topical around this time of year.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/01/heres-what-the-average-nfl-p...

> The minimum annual salary for a rookie active roster player with a one-year contract is $480,000 . . . A player with three years’ experience would command a salary equal to at least $705,000, while players with seven to nine years on the field must be paid at least $915,000 . . . the average NFL salary was only about $2.7 million in 2017 . . . That’s less than three-quarters of the average $4 million earnings of a major league baseball player and less than half the typical wage of NBA players, who earn about $7.1 million on average.

I take everything back! Let's not treat SWEs any differently. For that kind of money, I will gladly put in 80 hours a week.