[jazzdog]

Your post causes me to reflect on how good I've had it. I've been programming for 33 years. I've been on call 24/7 occasionally, but I can only recall a few days of that here and there. I've worked a 60+ hour work week maybe 2-3 times, but I doubt 3. I did do a 30 hour weekend awhile back, while with a startup. It was fun. I do recall one pitiless death march, and still have some bad thoughts about that episode, but overall, I never worked in places that operated as you describe, nor would I. I've tried to find something else I like more than programming, but haven't yet. And now I'm doing iOS development, leveraging Pulse and CouchDb, and doing some client-side data binding in the browser with knockout.js. There has never been a better time to be a programmer, IMO, with all the leverage the internet and open source gives us, so why stop now?