Which says to me that the game development culture of "work 80 hours per week for months on end" is largely about incompetent management, and/or deliberate abuse. It's not about getting things done.
I wonder if the author being a student pushing for a European PhD[1] warps his thinking about this. With a PhD all the reward is at the end. You either make or break. None of the work you do has any tangible results outside of the end goal.
Most work isn't like that. The rewards are continuous and ongoing. Meaning every task has captured value. If a loan officer closes 19 loans this month instead of 20, productivity is down 5%. BFD. Vs PhD student, complete 19 out of 20 required classes, no PhD. You totally wasted a couple of years of your life.
[1] Europeans historically are way more creditialist than Americans. Learning something isn't very helpful unless there is a credential to go along with it.
> None of the work you do has any tangible results outside of the end goal.
Depends on the field. From what I hear [citation needed], what you describe generally holds true in the humanities.
In contrast, I have two friends who're submitting their PhD theses around now, and they already have a ton of tangible results: They're required to publish papers during the research period for their thesis. They got to speak at conferences because of their published findings. They collaborated with other researchers whom they met at these conferences. And that, again, fed back into more papers and a better thesis. Even if they didn't get their PhD (which I'm sure they will), they still have made a name for themselves in their respective fields.
I have a PhD already (from an US institution), but there are elements that are pretty specific to academic research: it's fairly competitive (and wins are not that constant) and it's very individualized. It's also one where we have almost complete control of our time. It's more like being a freelancer, albeit with a fixed salary in an often bureaucratic environment.
I agree with you 100% that most work is not like that at all.
(Btw, most PhDs in Europe do not have required classes or, if they do, they tend to be pretty easy; it's the research component that's hard)
I think it's largely a loyalty and fealty signaling mechanism. Even though you are not achieving anything more, you are signaling your dedication to them by sacrificing leisure time.
