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Where did the 40 Hour Week Go?: "Any of my staff from my days in Kansas City, reading this, will recall my first ever team meeting. I handed out a single page with about 10 bullet points on it. This represented my promise to them, the tenets by how I would manage the team. One of the bullets said, large scale software development is a marathon and not a sprint! I promised them that I would help the team achieve a sustainable pace and that we'd try to achieve a 40 hour working week for the team. At the time, I hadn't read Kent Beck's 1st edition of Extreme Programming Explained. My experience with the 40 hour week rule dated back to Singapore when Jeff De Luca and to a lesser extent Steve Palmer and I would tour the office about 6.15pm and ask individuals whether they were still working. If it was a 'home job' (there own website or something similar) we'd let them stay, if it was project work, we'd strongly encourage them towards the door. In Singapore, the working week was/is 44 hours including 4 hours on a Saturday morning. But on week days, we tried hard to maintain a strict, 9am to 6pm with an hour for lunch, routine. We knew we had an 18 month project and we couldn't have people burning out. Sustainable pace focused around an 8 hour working day was the theme. However, we had another related rule in Singapore. When P"