This was never literally practiced.

But excessive hours were the norm. And I loved it. It helped me launch into a successful career.

But it hurt my relationship with my partner (now wife), and it burned me out.

I miss those days, but I don’t miss what they did to my health.

When you work long hours on a regular basis, you begin to lose a healthy perspective on work and life.

Not trust others is pretty obvious: leaders push for long hours because they don't trust people to be intrinsically motivated or to work in the most effective way for them. If you assume people are inherently unmotivated and lazy, well, trackable hours and artificial pressure seem like the obvious consequence.

But it's also a sign of not trusting yourself. Being judged on outcomes—never fully under your control—is scary. Being judged on anything fuzzy or arguable—taste, experience, skill, insight—is scary. If you're the sort of person who is content to "grind", the best way to win competitions is to turn them into grinding competitions. You can't be confident that you are more skilled, more intelligent or have better taste than others, but you can always just "grind" that extra hour. For a certain personality, time spent is by far the easiest metric to control.

If you grow up constantly being praised for how "hard" (read "long") you work, constantly out-competing people by doing more rather than better, the inherent value of "hard" work over everything becomes fundamentally ingrained in your personal story. And, unfortunately, our culture tends to put those people into positions of power, so this tendency gets reinforced and propagated.

Taking a step back, doing something good with less effort ought to be more impressive than doing it with more effort. That's what real potential looks like.

More importantly, even if working more hours purely increased your effectiveness and productivity—and we absolutely know that it doesn't—it would still be a weak form of leverage. Maybe you can work 2× the hours, but you can never work 10x. On the other hand, with taste and experience, you can absolutely come up with a 10× better design, or a 10× better understanding of what you're doing, and, unlike long hours, those 10× advantages compound.

If you trusted your own taste and creativity to give you the leverage you need, you wouldn't work ridiculous hours because you'd know it's counterproductive.

But when you don't, long hours are an easy, socially accepted fallback.

At my company, we only hire in India now and the executives are intentionally causing "attrition" in the US by running people into the ground with demands that amount to 996 style work.

- In grad school, I averaged 4 hours of sleep (6/7 days per week) and about 8 hours on sunday for about 5 months straight.

- In my first startup, I worked 9am to 11pm (had to walk back from the office) for about 12 months.

- During my second startup gig, my son was born and also I had an 8 hour time difference between local time and the primary timezone of the office. I woke up at 4 am and generally went to bed at 10pm most days. Waking up randomly at night to deal with newborn through toddler moments for about 4 years.

My experience with all of this:

Pros:

- Really fun to grind at times and euphoric when something works.

- Build really strong relationships with people in the trenches.

Cons (I felt like I was working but in retrospect I wasn't really productive):

- Pseudo-working - I ended up spinning plates of unnecessary pseudo-work that didn't move the needle.

- Time Dilation (biggest factor) - 9pm to 12am feels like 30 minutes. That's because my brain was slowing down. The more sleep deprivation, the more this happens during the day.

- Physical Burnout - My body felt tired with a constant low level of pain and my energy levels low. Also, stress eating made me fat.

- Mental Burnout - My mind constantly looked for distractions. Even when trying to focus, I couldn't focus

- Tactical Stupidity - I didn't find clever ways to avoid or fix problems. I just focused on the next thing. I didn't have bandwidth to reason effectively as I normally would.

Overall:

It's definitely useful to crunch and a great way to be mission oriented, but crunch cannot be constant. Sometimes you need to eat a pile of shit, but you shouldn't smear shit out and take it one lick at a time.

Furthermore, when you've attained a degree of understanding, you should be able to find better ways to leverage your time. The brain and body needs downtime to be creative--the best solutions are creative.

Finally in the world of agents, we have near infinite leverage. As a community should be engaged in deeper thought, rather than trying to grind towards a finish line that constantly moves.

I have "experimented" with working more but I found it unconstructive. Chances of stress is much higher and with stress comes doing stupid things that I afterwards will regret.

I believe this holds for both working for myself and someone else.

Japan tried this non-sense for a while (colleagues told they used to stay on till 11am !) only to completely fail at all three software revolutions (web/smartphone/ai). China obv. has had much better success, but I don't think this is sustainable. The central-banks in these countries operate in the war-economy mode which can heat things up a lot and work very well, but I think social-burnout effects are quite real.