The 40-hour work week wasn’t created arbitrarily—it wasn't introduced as a merciful limit and not a productivity benchmark to exceed.
Henry Ford popularised the 40-hour week in the 1920s—not out of kindness, but because he discovered that reducing working hours increased productivity and profit. Nearly a century later, the research still holds: consistent performance drops after 40–50 hours per week. Beyond that, burnout sets in. Quality drops. Health suffers. And retention? Forget about it.
So when a start-up expects engineers to routinely pull 60+ hour weeks, it’s not a sign of grit or innovation.
It’s a sign the business model is broken.
🚩 Why overwork signals a failing system:
1. You're not paying for performance — you're underpaying quietly
If you’re paying an engineer 70K for 40 hours/week but they end up working 60 hours, their real hourly rate is 46.6K. That’s not hustle. That’s a pay cut with extra steps.
You’re squeezing more labour from fewer people, not by rewarding them, but by stretching their capacity until they snap.
2. You don’t have enough money to run your company properly
If you need employees to work overtime just to survive, what that actually means is:
- You can't afford to hire enough people
- You’re not making enough revenue
- Your customer base doesn’t value your product enough to support healthy operations
That’s not a staffing issue. That’s a lack of market validation.
3. VC money hides the cracks
Most early-stage start-ups don’t make money. That’s fine—if you're validating your product and learning fast.
But many start-ups rely on venture capital to survive, not to grow. And under pressure to “scale,” they push their small teams to the edge. Long hours become the norm. But if your business only works when engineers grind 60+ hour weeks? That’s not scale. That’s desperation.
No amount of caffeine-fuelled late nights will fix a product nobody wants.
4. Great companies optimize, they don’t overclock
The best companies don’t win because their engineers work the most hours. They win because they:
- Understand their market
- Solve real problems
- Compensate people fairly
- Focus on impact per hour, not total hours
- Hire intentionally instead of burning out existing talent
Scaling responsibly isn’t glamorous, but it works.
⚠ TL;DR:
A business that requires 60+ hour workweeks to function is not high-performing. It’s under-capitalized, poorly validated, and unsustainable.
The 40-hour work week isn’t a limit—it’s a baseline for performance, creativity, and human well-being. And if your start-up can’t function within that constraint? You don’t need harder-working engineers.
You need a better business.
✍️ Let’s normalize calling out these patterns. If you’ve seen or experienced this kind of overwork culture, feel free to share your story below. Let's build better companies—together.
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