"there is no merit in working 80 hours for the sake of working 80 hours"
Bad managers beg to differ with you.
Inevitably this turns into MBA disease where you rank workers by the hours present. Your boss deathmarches you for 85 hours a week and his competition only deathmarches his workers for 75 hours? Guess who's getting the bigger annual bonus, Mr 85 hours of course. You're only willing to work 75 hours, what are you not a team player (aka why aren't you willing to destroy yourself to make me richer)?
Its very hard for someone who doesn't know anything about a domain specific subject to evaluate the quality of a specialist worker. On the other hand its pretty easy to record, graph, chart, and rate number of hours. Half of all managers by definition are below the median; 50:50 odds aren't looking so good.
The worst possible outcome is when professional goals and workplace metrics don't align. So I could do that in 40 hours of serious head down grinding, which would be OK if I only had to be in the office for 40 hours, but worker has to be present for 80 hours to meet the metric goal of appearing busy to show off to the other managers and get that bonus. Wish I could be learning a new language or technology or playing games sitting out on my patio at home for some of those 30-40 hours/week. Well, back to checking social media sites and watching cat videos so the time can get marked off as "present". Unless you're all open plan office in which case you either have to not give a F and do it anyway, or be very stealthy, or most likely just socialize and do busywork. Also over 50 or so hours work quality takes a sharp dive, so at 60 hours you're probably actually accomplishing less than if you worked 40, so now you "need" to work 70, which results in even less milestones accomplished, inevitably the negative feedback loop spirals out of control until you're present for the maximum physical possible time, yet accomplishing basically nothing.
"I think it's easy for most people to agree that 80 hour work-weeks are typically bugs, not features - especially as they often seem to be a symptom of a dysfunctional working environment."
I think, that you think, that I think, that we disagree, but actually I agree with your post and wish to extend it to show that 80-hour weeks not only don't align with personal success as per your well written post, but also 80 hours weeks do not align with organizational/business success.
"there is no merit in working 80 hours for the sake of working 80 hours"
Bad managers beg to differ with you.
Inevitably this turns into MBA disease where you rank workers by the hours present. Your boss deathmarches you for 85 hours a week and his competition only deathmarches his workers for 75 hours? Guess who's getting the bigger annual bonus, Mr 85 hours of course. You're only willing to work 75 hours, what are you not a team player (aka why aren't you willing to destroy yourself to make me richer)?
Its very hard for someone who doesn't know anything about a domain specific subject to evaluate the quality of a specialist worker. On the other hand its pretty easy to record, graph, chart, and rate number of hours. Half of all managers by definition are below the median; 50:50 odds aren't looking so good.
The worst possible outcome is when professional goals and workplace metrics don't align. So I could do that in 40 hours of serious head down grinding, which would be OK if I only had to be in the office for 40 hours, but worker has to be present for 80 hours to meet the metric goal of appearing busy to show off to the other managers and get that bonus. Wish I could be learning a new language or technology or playing games sitting out on my patio at home for some of those 30-40 hours/week. Well, back to checking social media sites and watching cat videos so the time can get marked off as "present". Unless you're all open plan office in which case you either have to not give a F and do it anyway, or be very stealthy, or most likely just socialize and do busywork. Also over 50 or so hours work quality takes a sharp dive, so at 60 hours you're probably actually accomplishing less than if you worked 40, so now you "need" to work 70, which results in even less milestones accomplished, inevitably the negative feedback loop spirals out of control until you're present for the maximum physical possible time, yet accomplishing basically nothing.