> do you know anyone who actually does measurable quality work for 16h straight in a consistent way?
Knock it down to 14h, and I can think of 2 people. I worked for both, and both fell into the category of having moved to the US from another country. My career took me elsewhere, but they were both great to work for.
In my experience people who work long hours are often too tired to be objective about the quality of the work they are delivering or their own efficiency .
The short version is, despite the information-age, we still think about this stuff in an industrial-age terms; that productivity is directly proportional to time spent. In fact it's highly non-linear for most forms of information-age value creating activitie.
I agree with you completely. Even our work schedules are still based on the mandated daylight times which were created so that factories wouldn't have to keep their lights on for too long.
I'm an expat myself so I'm curious about this.. Were their visas tied to their work contract? Did they have their families living with them?
As an anecdote, when I first moved abroad I was single and didn't speak the local language (Dutch) so I didn't really have any incentive to interact socially outside of work and I ended up spending way too many hours in the office but just about managing to do my job competently because I was pretty sad and demotivated all the time and often doubted my decision to move abroad.
Knock it down to 14h, and I can think of 2 people. I worked for both, and both fell into the category of having moved to the US from another country. My career took me elsewhere, but they were both great to work for.