The reality is that awesome things take gobs of time. 40 hours a week WON'T CUT IT. It just won't. I've made some awesome things that just took waking up at 6AM and working solid til 11PM, for weeks. That is how great things are achieved.
Same. But the difference between us is that I recognize that what made it worth spending that time was that it was something I chose to do because I wanted to do it, not because my boss told me to do it.
More to the point, every minute spent doing the things my bosses have ever told me to do was a minute I couldn't spend on those other things that are awesome and that I would gladly work crazy hours for.
So what happens when people's jobs try to take so many hours from them is that a tiny percentage of people for whom that's truly exactly what they want to do might love it, but the rest of the employees burn out and run away screaming, and you end up with not enough workers to get the product done.
And they burn out precisely because those bosses are putting their needs — getting what *they* think is an amazing and awesome project — over the workers' needs — having time to do all the stuff on the side that *the workers* think is amazing and awesome.
Corporate jobs can do 9-5 because they are like cruise ship and are just already slow. But rapid progress requires dedication.
Not at all. Rapid progress requires adequate labor. It is less efficient with more people spending fewer hours, but still more efficient than if you burn out all of those people and you end up with only a few people spending a lot of hours and everybody else leaving the project and taking their institutional knowledge with them.
As long as the profits are properly shared, I see no reason for poo-pooing this concept. I want to work with fellow rock stars.
See that's the thing, I *do* work with fellow rock stars. Every single person I work with is a rock star at something. Some of them are also rock stars in their jobs.
I don't want a 9-5'er on my team. Not if it's anything for real.
I don't want anyone to ever lead me who doesn't acknowledge that their priorities aren't my priorities. Not if it's for more than a few weeks.
I'm not a 9-to-5'er. I just spend 56 hours a week sleeping, 40+ hours a week at work writing software, sixteen hours a week working on random projects, ten hours a week exercising, eight hours a week rehearsing in music ensembles, eight hours a week eating, five hours a week driving, 1 hour a week in church, a couple of hours of time waiting in between those things, various numbers of hours trying to find a girlfriend to spend the rest of my life with, and most of the rest of my time recovering from all of the above. Oh, and laundry once a month or so, performances once a month, lots of hours (bursty) doing planning for the ensemble that I actually run...
Sometimes it feels like I never stop working. But I have much broader interests than the one little thing that I do as my job to pay the bills. And I really feel sorry for people who don't. Because those folks aren't the ones who create the things that are amazing. They're the cogs, not the ones turning the gears.