John,

Agree with you there. Before our company was acquired by a larger company (and for a year or two after that happened) our management was of the opinion that developers must slave away 60-hours-a-week. Ridiculous deadlines, sales hype and all the rest was thrown at the group to "motivate" them to work 20+ extra hours for free.

Agree that development can sometimes result in weird hours toward the end of a long project as you clean up the loose ends, but expecting that kind of nonsense (weekends, etc) on a constant basis only burns a group out. We had extremely high turnover during that period of time. The extra time demanded of some of these (particularly the younger) developers burned them out and we lost what they learned when they left - so was all the extra worth it? No, it wasn't.

I've been doing this 30 years myself - and as you get more experienced you don't HAVE to work as hard to get the same results. Even with that being the case a good steady 40-45 hour week will produce far more than a burning 60-hour will, particularly in the long run.

-CB