[michaelochurch]

Working twice as hard to do twice as much grunt work (especially someone else's grunt work) is a gigantic waste of time. If the boss gives a shit, he'll hire more people.

As far as I'm concerned, if I have to work more than 40 hours to earn my keep, that means the work is of marginal importance and we should really be discussing either (a) hiring more people to handle this glut of grunt work, or (b) not doing it, focusing instead on higher-yield stuff. A programmer's salary is low enough in comparison to value-add that 15 hours per week is break-even, unless the work being assigned is of unusually low importance. So a 60-hour mandate is a sign that we're making up for a lack of strategy through sheer effort, and that never works out in the long run.

On the other hand, working twice as hard to learn twice as fast (or to have twice as good an insight into what it worth working on) is a different story. That can be worth it, because it often ends up making huge differences. If you think of a skill set as an asset, the difference between 10% per year and 5% per year, taken out over 30 years, is that one portfolio does 4.32x and the other does 17.45x-- massive difference. Also, knowledge's time value is such that one might have to work hard (at least in spurts) to get and use the high-yield knowledge.