If you are working with a group of people that are considered "super smart", and you are in that group, well, regardless of what you say, the inclusion in the group makes you also "super smart". So, in fact you should be working even less than 40 hours and get much much more done than the "average" group.
It almost seems like Amazon culture foster's this attitude of "we hire really smart people, if you can't keep up, you need to work harder." This might make sense if one or two people in the group were doing the long hours but when its the whole group, well, I would suggest that the company has done a great job of selling the kool-aid.
Amazon doesn't foist a 'keep up' requirement on people. You can just do your job, make a bunch of money and have fun working here for a long time. There might be a little bit more work compared to other companies that build packaged software, but nothing the web companies don't have.
And no - I was not saying the team does long hours either. We have all mixes of people, some do long hours and some wrap it at 40 or 45 max. I was only justifying why some might do long hours.
Any super-smart group with good camaraderie gets a bunch of work done. But if you want to distinguish yourself in that group, you are going to have to put in extra. There is also the pesky part about differing experiences / knowledge bases. It takes extra to tap into all that as well. All of that add up.
If you are working with a group of people that are considered "super smart", and you are in that group, well, regardless of what you say, the inclusion in the group makes you also "super smart". So, in fact you should be working even less than 40 hours and get much much more done than the "average" group.
It almost seems like Amazon culture foster's this attitude of "we hire really smart people, if you can't keep up, you need to work harder." This might make sense if one or two people in the group were doing the long hours but when its the whole group, well, I would suggest that the company has done a great job of selling the kool-aid.