How do you make programmers work 60-80 hours per week?

Original question from Quora:

Programmers in our startup usually put 8 hours and go home. I keep reading stories about 80+ hour weeks. How do you make them work longer hours? Do we have to pay overtime? We gave few of them some equity, but it doesn’t seem to work.

My Answer:

I’m going to tell you a secret, so please listen closely.

No programmers really work 60-80 hours a week, especially in a 5 day span. That is a 12-16 hour day, 5 days a week.

I promise you that any company that has programmers “working” that many hours is really only getting 2-4 hours of real work out of them each day. The rest of the time will be filled with pointless meetings, a fair amount of web browsing, and then a whole lot of looking busy…