[TheOtherHobbes]

I'd guess most people have had the experience of working late and beating their head against a problem for hours, leaving it, and solving it in minutes the next morning.

This isn't about opinion. There's increasing hard evidence that limited hours and a four day work week don't just increase employee happiness, they increase productivity and company value.

The question isn't "Why do only some people regularly want to work long hours?" but "Why are long hours considered heroic, when in fact they cause predictable harm to individuals and organisations?"

It's not just IT. Law, medicine, finance, and even big-name architecture all have the same culture of professional hazing where newcomers are expected to give themselves stress-related PTSD before they're allowed to start climbing the ladder.

And the abuse becomes generational because of "It never did me any harm" - when in fact it clearly did.

[kipchak]

Maybe it's something like a much milder kind of historical human sacrifice, where the intuition is that greater sacrifice means greater reward. This is useful in some cases such as delayed gratification but is harmful when the sacrifice is seen as directly producing the desired gain.

Generally there's a correlation between sacrifice and and reward- the "no pain no gain" idea goes back fairly far for example. When the intuition taken to it's logical extreme that the greater the ask the greater the sacrifice necessary, which is where you get something like Moloch.

It's interesting you mention the ladder and hazing - one idea is that human sacrifice was more prevalent the stronger the hierarchy, and that sacrifice helped support the hierarchy and priests in a position of authority, which seems to run parallels to what you're describing.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-human-sacrifi...