It's very telling that the US is losing technology leadership in so many areas, and instead of opening our eyes as a group and trying to improve, we're just going down the same road of putting in long hours.
I guess when you're raised in a culture that rate the number of hours you put in ahead of how much you get done and how high the quality of your work is, you end up being a butt-in-seat staffer rather than someone who just gets things done.
As far as I can tell, we aren't losing technology leadership to countries that have shorter workweeks than ours. If anything, the opposite appears to be true to me (India, China, nations from the former USSR).
it creates the culture as seen in the office space movie "in a given week, I do about 15 minutes worth of work".
Take a simple form, and a programmer in a corporate environment will tell you that it'll take them a week to finish. That same programmer, working for themselves would finish that same form in a couple of hours.
I guess when you're raised in a culture that rate the number of hours you put in ahead of how much you get done and how high the quality of your work is, you end up being a butt-in-seat staffer rather than someone who just gets things done.
Sigh.