“He’s been subject to no technical oversight whatsoever, but he has the Chinese work ethic.”
“Don’t let these people catch the work/life balance disease that everyone else has. Make it clear to them that we expect them to be available at any time of the day or night.”
“You are saying he is working 200 hours a week on this? Single-threaded? No context-switching?”
“You know, the new thing in Big Tech these days is working 24 hours a day. You just go home, eat your dinner and then go right back to work.”

~~~

The above is a mere sample of only one flavor of idiocy that I have started to lose my patience with in the past week.

Working extra hours is something that should only be considered a virtue in limited circumstances. Those circumstances are when there’s a real problem, e.g. production is actually down, your customers are mad, or there’s a specific, well-defined goal with a real deadline that has to be hit in the near future. A bona fide emergency.

When you don’t have an emergency, your focus should be success in a stable, repeatable fashion without expending the maximum amount of effort possible. You need to keep your maximum effort in reserve for the emergencies. It also needs to be used sparingly because if it’s really your maximum effort, you aren’t able to maintain it for very long.

You definitely shouldn’t be spending your maximum effort building bridges to nowhere. Nor should you spend it rebuilding that exact bridge to nowhere. Nor should you expend that maximum effort to do this rebuilding eight times over 5 years, at a cost of $30 million, to produce a revenue of $50 thousand in the same period. Nor should you do it to rebuild things that have already been built more robustly years ago just because you don’t want to take the time to understand them.

I think part of the reason people find virtue in seeing other people work many hours is that they understand effort is being expended, even when they don’t understand what it is being expended on.