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Working excessive hours coding can severely impact physical, mental, emotional, and social well-being. The post shares two personal experiences of working long hours on tech projects and emphasizes the negative consequences and the importance of proper work-life balance. It's crucial to consider your health and avoid prolonged periods of intense work, regardless of potential financial gains.

How Many Hours Can You Code?

The autor situation is an extreme, and of course, should be avoided at all costs.
It’s so odd how people is so unaware of the damages that bad habits and excessive working hours can cause.
And also how people confuse trully productive hours with quantity of hours.

<blockquote>
and your employer will replace your corpse
</blockquote>
This is one of the hardest hitting lines I’ve ever read.

Around 2006-2007, I was a manager at a cell phone repair facility. If you remember this time period, it was the beginning of the housing crisis that turned into a massive recession. The company I was working for had already shipped most of the jobs to Mexico, and we only had a few customers left. The largest one was my responsibility. Near the end, they had already decided to send these jobs off to China. However, I was young - and stupid. I thought I could stop this from happening . Our customer gave us absolutely ridiculous schedules and yield requirements, that I knew could not be hit with our current staff. So I took it upon myself to beg everyone to work extra hours, and started hand tracing all of the phones in the orders to make sure we hit the targets. Cherry picking the easy repairs. Swapping out the ones that needed extra rework, and dealing with any issues real-time. I was literally putting pallets of repaired phones in my personal truck, and driving them to UPS because we missed the pick-up.
Normally, I only worked the first shift. Then, I started working first and second shift. Eventually no amount of Cherry-Picking or robbing Peter to pay Paul was going to be able to meet the schedule, and I was literally there (one time) for over 24 hours straight trying to hit the requirement.
It was at that point that I decided I would NEVER do anything like that again.
Now, I work from 7:30 to 4. Nobody has my cell phone number. My work phone automatically goes on silent at 4. I haven’t been happier.

Mental and physical health is very important in this era. It’s difficult because often our job is also our passion and we tend work even in our free time. But out bodies were born to move so these extended periods of hard work are taking it’s price. Your employee usually does not care about your future health problems, so you should be the one that will say no to extra hours. Occasionally it’s OK, but you have to know the price of such hard work.
My priority is my health, only then I can be productive and work hard and be happy in long run.

I guess the hustle culture, even though it has been dealt a blow by GenZ work ethics, has always existed in some form or the other.
Glorifying overwork has been something that has been set a flavour by the CxO’s on top to normalise exploitation. It’s by design that the line between productivity and burning out is blurred to milk someone till the last drop.
I hope more such instances and post surface to help folk re-evaluate their own work life balance. Here in India, we’re still waking up to understanding exploitation amidst the self aggrandising “we are the hard workers of the world” that we do all our chest thumping over.