[adpoe]

Early in my career, I worked at a few different businesses where management expected us to work 12+ hour days. Mostly web development & design.

We did it, but the secret was that we didn't spend all of that time actually heads-down, working. (Surprise.)

We were in the office for 12+ hours (sometimes until 3am, having client calls and presentations at midnight), but how much of that time were we actually getting creative, productive work done? Maybe half.

And here's the problem: The hard part was, I was managing projects, and I had developers putting in 12+ hour days against my budgets, when I knew that maybe 6 of those hours were actually productive work time. Everything went over budget, across the board, for everyone's projects. At least on paper.

'Moral' of the story: you can require people to work whatever time frames you want. And if you pay well enough, people will do it. (At least until they burn out, or find a more prestigious/higher-paying job.) But it's a waste of everyone's time and money, and it creates more problems than its solves.

Worst of all, you're creating an environment where the culture of working 12+ hours is nothing but theatre. You spend half your time creating and carefully cultivating an artifice, just to meet management's expectations... which they know are unrealistic. Talk about being unproductive.