Whether you realize it or not, you are likely interacting with ill or disabled people regularly. According to recent survey data, a high portion of the U.S. workforce reports having a disability (30 percent), even though a much smaller percentage says they’ve self-identified as disabled to their employer (only 3.2 percent). Often, these illnesses and disabilities are impossible for others to observe, so many people choose to keep their conditions a secret from managers and co-workers to avoid discrimination.

Health is not binary; it can fluctuate and is subjective. I have experienced a number of health challenges, including having brain surgery twice (once while pregnant) and one life-threatening brain infection (which can take years to recover from). Trust me when I say that you can’t assess someone’s health based on their appearance or mood. And yet, over one-third of people with disabilities say they have experienced negative bias in their current job.

I work in the tech industry, where there is an overt glorification—and in many cases, a requirement—of working unhealthily long hours. This is in spite of research showing that putting in longer hours doesn’t lead to greater productivity and instead is harmful. And when you’re ill or disabled and working in this field, the long hours can be not just counterproductive but discriminatory.

A banner from 1856 reads, “8 hours labour, 8 hours recreation, 8 hours rest.” Source: Wikimedia

Fewer hours in the day

Many people with chronic illnesses or disabilities simply have fewer hours in the day. We may need more sleep than comparatively healthy people—and yet still wake up feeling awful—as well as have to carefully budget limited energy. Conditions often require frequent doctor visits, blood tests, MRIs, physical therapy, and other appointments, plus there’s dealing with the administrative burden of managing scheduling, billing, and insurance claims, all of which frequently involve errors.

In an episode of the podcast No End in Sight, which is focused on chronic illness, a front-end software engineer named John pinpointed his experience feeling time-crunched. John has bipolar disorder and Fabry disease, a rare genetic disorder that causes reduced kidney function and chronic pain and requires him to get regular IV infusion treatments. He described being told during a job interview at Microsoft that he needed to spend more of his free time coding:

I really felt looked down on as being lazy. And really, I’m not lazy. I have chronic illness, and I’m trying to do the best—like, I’m not trying to push myself too hard because I don’t want to throw myself into a bipolar tailspin. And I also don’t want to hurt my hands and have it be even worse to type… I was told by this abled person how to go about living assuming that I was abled, and it was just really frustrating. I’ve contributed at least a thousand hours to open source, and I’m supposed to just keep doing more. When does it end?

Natasha Walton, who founded the Tech Disability Project, has fibromyalgia and post-traumatic stress disorder. She noted on Twitter that certain aspects of the day, like sleep and fitness routines, are not optional for her. “They account for the time I spend meeting my body’s basic needs each and every day so that I can participate in the wider world,” she explained.

The tech work environment is hostile even to healthy people. The “ideal worker” in tech is in perfect health, child-free, and has no other commitments. I’ve had several jobs in tech that I could do for a time, and even do quite well, but that I knew would be unsustainable for me long-term. The question was not if I would burn out, but when. Numerous co-workers have also seemed on the brink of burnout regardless of whether they had a chronic illness. I even have tech-industry friends who developed permanent chronic illnesses while in toxic work environments.

There are companies where people like me would not be welcome based on unreasonable employee demands. Last year, Andrew Ng’s deeplearning.ai posted a controversial job ad that not only specified that employees typically spend 70-90 hours per week working and studying (later changed to 70+ hours), but that doing so is the natural consequence of believing you can change the world. Many companies operate on this assumption, even if most are not quite so frank about it.

Elon Musk posted a declaration that to change the world, people need to work 80 hours per week, peaking above 100 at times. Uber formerly had an explicit company value to “work harder, longer, and smarter” and served dinner at 8:15 p.m. “Working seven days a week, sometimes until 1 or 2 a.m., was considered normal,” said one former employee. A New York Times article about Amazon described “marathon conference calls on Easter Sunday and Thanksgiving, criticism from bosses for spotty Internet access on vacation, and hours spent working at home most nights or weekends,” as well as employees being given low-performance ratings directly after cancer treatment, major surgeries, or giving birth to a stillborn child.

The research on productivity

As much as possible, we need to get away from the shallow idea that the quantity of time worked is what matters. The tech industry’s obsession with ridiculously long hours is not only inaccessible to many disabled people and harmful to everyone’s health and relationships, but as Olivia Goldhill pointed out for Quartz at Work, research on productivity suggests it’s just inefficient:

As countless studies have shown, this simply isn’t true. Productivity dramatically decreases with longer work hours, and completely drops off once people reach 55 hours of work a week, to the point that, on average, someone working 70 hours in a week achieves no more than a colleague working 15 fewer hours.

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang’s book Rest covers the crucial role that leisure time and downtime play in our creativity, health, and productivity. Prolific, talented figures including Charles Darwin, Henri Poincaré, G.H. Hardy, mathematician Paul Halmos, Charles Dickens, and many others were known to engage in only four or five hours of highly concentrated work per day. Pang also highlights an overlooked aspect of the “rule” popularized by Malcolm Gladwell that to become an expert takes 10,000 hours of practice. Gladwell based it on psychologist K. Anders Ericsson’s study of top musical performers, but Pang observes that the top performers also slept more and took afternoon naps:

We’ve come to believe that world-class performance comes after 10,000 hours of practice. But that’s wrong. It comes after 10,000 hours of deliberate practice, 12,500 hours of deliberate rest, and 30,000 hours of sleep.

More support for rest-boosted productivity is detailed in a Harvard Business Review roundup titled “The Research Is Clear: Long Hours Backfire for People and for Companies.” It highlights a variety of other study results: