There are plenty of companies that try to get their employees to work those kind of hours. And, developers being as they are, there are certainly several who do in fact see that many hours/week.

But really, in order for it to happen, the developers need to allow themselves to be walked over. Sadly, "being walked over" is a common skill in your average dev, while "not being walked over" is rare. All it takes is one guy to stand up for the team though, and sanity will prevail.

I've been that guy on occasion. Developer Employee #1 at a newly funded startup, I sat in a meeting the first week where the CTO laid out a rough timeline and the CEO said something along the lines of "these are 60 hour weeks we're talking about, right?". Amazingly, the CTO didn't immediately say "of course not". So I did.

To my knowledge, no developer ever worked more than 40 hours in a single week while I was there.

No, but that does not mean they won't try. I have worked jobs (back in 2008) where you worked from 8am to 9pm normally.

However usually those company's prefer the greener type of employee who is willing to take this kind of abuse. Get a Salaried position and they whip and beat you to get the work out of you.

President, CTO's can generally spend a lot of time working in order to keep everything going.

40 hour work week is the LAW in the US FYI; if they are asking you to work 65 hours a week and you are salaried. You are entitled to overtime pay.

Employers love it when employee's don't know the law; it allows them to get away with not paying them overtime when they are legally entitled.

Do salaried programmers/developers/software/engineers in the US get overtime pay? In Canada's province of Ontario there is a specific exception in labour law saying that these kind of salaried employees are exempt from overtime pay:

http://www.labour.gov.on.ca/english/es/tools/srt/coverage_go...

http://www.ontario.ca/laws/regulation/010285#BK17

(I haven't found definitive answers for other provinces.)

Edit: spelling

If they are an "Exempt" employee, then they don't get overtime. Exempt comes from the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938.

The US is way behind the curve when compared to other developed countries. I'd like to see the FSLA updated to the same level of protection as the EU Working Time Directive.

I thought "salaried" overtime only applied to people that made less than a certain amount of money annually. If my memory serves me correctly, I heard it was about $50,000. If that's the case I would not be eligible, but if it applies to all salaried employees regardless of pay, then that's very interesting...

I don't know what would be worse, that you're right or that you believe that's true.

Unfortunately I don't know the US federal and state laws, so I can't really tell you if you're right :) but I can tell you that in the rest of the western world, 40 hours (or even less) are law for everyone, including CEO, CTO and whatever C level you throw at it. Anything after that has to be paid overtime or you're breaking the law.

The shepherds will be brutal as long as the sheep are docile.

Most programmers etc. in California can claim overtime if they make less than $84K. Nationally, it's $23K.

There are a lot of loopholes companies can use to avoid the minimum salary. See the link below. The minimum hourly rate is $41.00 for Exempt computer software professionals according to that link:

http://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/Glossary.asp?Button1=E#employee%2...

I don't think I've ever heard of a startup where anybody but the founders work 65 hours a week and those are not even official hours.

Thanks-- just to clarify these are regular engineer/developer hours, I will make a note in the original post that these are not founder/co-founder hours.

Absolutely not then. I've never heard of 65 hrs a week either (for non founder/cofounder)

There are a couple of things about this.

Firstly yes it does happen, it happened at my startup and others that I know.

Secondly, it is an indicator of how inexperienced the team (and management) at the startup are.

Research has shown that knowledge workers spend typically less than 20 hours a week doing actual productive work, and beyond that it's ass in seat time (read Peopleware).

It is somewhat counter intuitive but often (not always) the way to launch (or whatever your goal) is to work less hours not more. My last gig (which required considerable programming skill) only needed me to spend 4-6 hours a day to get a prototype of a truly innovative product.

Most good senior developers don't do more than 40 hour weeks and most good managers + CTOs don't ask for it because they know it hinders, not helps.

Junior devs often do it because they don't know better and inexperienced management encourage it because they think more work hours == more work (flat out wrong).

Finally one of the reasons why this may be the case is it (a)is what startups to (b) looks good to investors.

It doesn't matter what others do and how many hours they spend in the office. Only becasue some people do stupid things you don't have to follow them. If you are "just" an employee (eg. you are not working for the fuck-you-money) and still work 65 hours a week you are selling your soul for cheap and are high probably on the way to burn out. Maybe it's time for you to learn to say politely "no" and to get back to the 40 hours work week.

There are some that exist - I know a company in the adtech space like that. But my experience has been very flexible.