If these exceptional people are making it necessary for me to work very long hours too, then it’s fair enough for me to complain about that, no? Very few of the people you are talking about are curing cancer (so to speak), so why are the rest of us required to be grateful to them?
Let’s look at it another way. Someone who’s willing to work an 80 hour week for the same pay that I get is roughly equivalent to someone who’ll do my job for half the pay (leaving aside the dubious productivity benefits of long hours). Should I be grateful for the existence of such a person? We do not usually romanticize people who are willing to do professional jobs for low compensation. Why romanticize people who work crazy hours? If I voluntarily took a 50% pay cut, would you wax lyrical about how the world needs more exceptional people like me?
> And such teams are just vastly more effective and can do stuff in a weekend that a traditional committee-based process would not get done in a year.
Here you’re conflating two different things. Small agile teams that have the freedom to work without bureaucratic overhead are great, but there is no inherent need for them to work crazy hours. If anything, long hours are often a symptom of an environment where people are judged on how long they stay in the office rather than on the quality of their work.
This is beypnd jobs and corporations and is about humanity and civilization. A small minority of people in every era actually pushed on any kind of frontier. That's ok. We need people who just execute the mundane tasks too, that's most of us.
But giving space to exceptional people is not even that expensive. The overtime doesn't even have to be documented. Just leave them alone. There aren't enough of them to truly outcompete regular people.
For most people focusing on family and having a mediocre career is optimal and there really isn't anything wrong with that. But you won't get top achievement out of that. Nor will you get that from forcing people to be in the office. You get it from a rare special alignment of stars where somehow you get an aligned high trust team. Just don't trample that flower, that's all.
Regarding cancer. Lots of cancer research, simulations and drug discovery use GPUs that were only developed because there was a gaming industry which was kickstarted by a bunch of outlier nerds like John Carmack and the popularity of those 3d games enabled economies of scale for making specialized hardware, GPUs. And then other tinkerers who likely also pulled lots of all nighters developed GPGPU, general purpose computations on GPUs which was not the original purpose of GPUs at all. Seeing the research success of such uses, NVIDIA developed Cuda and made GPUs more convenient in non graphics use cases. You just never know. Let the outlier people do their thing and pursue their passion. There will never be a world where all the average employees can have this kind of output. Somebody has to dream a vision, the implementation tasks don't fall out of the sky. Tall poppy syndrome is very bad for societies.
The vast majority of people working very long hours aren't pushing any frontiers. They are just trying to become partners in a law firm or get promoted at McKinsey. (Or, if we look outside our middle class bubble for a moment, they are working in kitchens and cleaning apartments for below minimum wage.)
I'm not convinced that a significant number of people actually do object to other people working long hours. It's only a problem if unreasonable expectations become the norm – in which case you don't have to attribute malicious motives to people ('tall poppy syndrome') to explain their objections. They object simply because they don't want to spend all their time working, which is easy enough to comprehend.
Let’s look at it another way. Someone who’s willing to work an 80 hour week for the same pay that I get is roughly equivalent to someone who’ll do my job for half the pay (leaving aside the dubious productivity benefits of long hours). Should I be grateful for the existence of such a person? We do not usually romanticize people who are willing to do professional jobs for low compensation. Why romanticize people who work crazy hours? If I voluntarily took a 50% pay cut, would you wax lyrical about how the world needs more exceptional people like me?
> And such teams are just vastly more effective and can do stuff in a weekend that a traditional committee-based process would not get done in a year.
Here you’re conflating two different things. Small agile teams that have the freedom to work without bureaucratic overhead are great, but there is no inherent need for them to work crazy hours. If anything, long hours are often a symptom of an environment where people are judged on how long they stay in the office rather than on the quality of their work.