Gray Hair? Read and Weep!

[Seth Gordon]

Ethan Schwartz wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 2:20 PM, Mark Woodward <markw-FJ05HQ0HCKaWd6l5hS35sQ at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/28/silicon-valley%E2%80%99s-dark-secret-it%E2%80%99s-all-about-age/
> 
>>From the article:
> "As well, the older worker likely has a family and needs to leave by 6 pm,
> whereas the young can pull all-nighters"

Even before I had a family that wanted me home at night, I could not do 
more than eight hours (minus lunch, etc.) of *coding*, or anything else 
that required a similar level of intellectual effort.  (Actually, back 
then I was doing more tech writing than coding, but the same principle 
applied.)  I would eventually get to a state of “brain fried; must go home”.

I could, however, spend ten or even eleven hours a day in the office if 
most of those hours were spent sitting in meetings, sending out email 
asking a coworker for some kind of documentation for the FooBar API, 
spinning my wheels reading Slashdot while waiting for any of my emailed 
questions to get a response, doing some task more akin to data entry 
than programming, etc., etc.

So whenever I read about an IT workplace where sixty-hour weeks are the 
norm, I don’t think “workers who burn the midnight oil because they have 
the vigor of youth”; I think “workers who waste time because they are 
poorly managed”.

Now that I’m on the far side of 40, I do worry about facing age 
discrimination, but if it keeps me out of this kind of environment, 
maybe that’s just as well.